Another window lets you see what's visible in the solar system, including what time an object rises and when it sets. You can also create a list of the stars you wish to observe directly within the application, and there's a very useful pane that can be opened to list all the things you can currently see in the display. You can also change the appearance of the charts, removing the color or the way the stars are rendered, and this is ideal if you want to print out your plans. This is helped by a huge star catalog, and you can keep adding more objects to the view until there's no room left on the screen.

It's diagrammatic more than realistic, and it's the best approach when you want to manually find a star in the sky, because you then need to work your way around the obvious signpost stars and constellations to find the object for which you're looking. The charts, for example, resemble the kind you used to see printed in newspapers and still see in astronomy-related publications and websites. It's this clarity that makes Cartes du Ciel a standout. This is what you need if you're planning a night of real-life observations with a telescope, rather than a virtual preview of what the sky above you might look like (this is something that KStars also does very well). But rather than go for Stellarium's realistic approach, it attempts to make their positions clear and discoverable. Like Stellarium and KStars, Cartes du Ciel is a tool that maps a star's position in the night sky. And the name tells you all you need to know about this great application, an application that's been in development since the early 2000s. The English translation for the name of this application is 'Sky map' or 'Sky chart,' but this app's French name, Cartes du Ciel, sounds so much more romantic that we'll stick with it.

Cartes du ciel skychart package