First, let me reccomend this to anyone with an interest in Astronomy, or who is taking in Astronomy-related class somewhere (I sure wish I had this years ago when I was taking Astronomy in college).
Now, an amazing 3-dimensional adventure through the solar system and much more. To this minute, I've been through mostly the entire Milky Way, and I don't even know how far this program maps. This is amazing.
Very easy to learn how to navigate around. Drag around with the mouse, or use your arrow keys, travel at 100 m/sec or 100 times the speed of light, or on the scale of astronomical units per second (1 AU is the distance from earth to sun)... impressive, easy to turn on/off labels of orbits, planets, constellations, and much more (all easy to find in Preferences). You can even see cities, mountains, and other things, all at the click of the mouse.
Great choices of rendering paths (for graphics) from Basic to OpenGL 2.0, and many things in between (which will work better with different video cards, old and new). It will even tell you (in most cases) if you cannot use the selected rendering option. There's something for anyone. Beautiful graphics. I suggest that you see for yourself. It's hard to describe the fact that I can see almost every detail of the moon, as deeply as I've ever studied its surface. Very, very impressive on my 19" monitor on my G5 tower.
There's even a 'Favorites' menu (akin to Bookmarks). Zoom from planet to start to constellation in seconds. There is so much you can do with this program. Or just leisurely show your friends what a cool program you found.
I highly suggest this for anyone _teaching_ astronomy as a professor or teacher. Chris Laurel, and anyone else involved in developing this deserves credit for the most impressive and comprehensive (yet simple in nature) space exploration app I've seen that is so easy to use, even a relative computer novice can tool around.
And free. Props. I honestly can't say anything negative. Congrats on an amazing app. I wish I found this a long time ago.