When I took astronomy classes in college, I was introduced to a very cool program called Digital Universe. It's developed by the Hayden Planetarium (the one whe

When I took astronomy classes in college, I was introduced to a very cool program called Digital Universe. It's developed by the Hayden Planetarium (the one where Neil deGrasse Tyson is Director) and comes with a module to explore the "local neighborhood" of stars. It was used in the astronomy program for education and outreach to the general public, and one of the cool things we would do with it was have the audience identify a constellation and then zoom in to see just how disconnected the stars actually are. It has other modules for different astronomical objects/scales. They have a free version for download on their website: http://www.amnh.org/our-research/hayden-planetarium/digital-universe/download http://www.amnh.org/our-research/hayden-planetarium/digital-...