I know there's Stellarium for my planetarium needs, but are there any noob friendly free orrery programs out there? Preferably with an easy to use interface and nice graphics, more for fun and to get a feel of the solar sytem than to accurately map stuff?

 

I've seen a bunch of stuff online, but it seems very much of the windows 98 variety and focused on accurate data and simulation with no eye candy.

There is a software called CELESTIA its pretty cool...just the one you need..

Thanks, that looks great akshay, I'll check it out right away.

It's not as good as some of the software out there (yet) but Wolfram Alpha may help you out too.

because i m a astronomer i have skymap pro 11,starry night pro plus,deepsky software,celestia,voyager software :-)

It's not as good as some of the software out there (yet) but Wolfram Alpha may help you out too.

 

Well I wasn't looking for anything like this, but damm that's an interesting project there, thanks. Definitely going to play about with this too.