Stellarium is such a beautiful product. I used it back in college and shared it with the astrophysics majors, and they all loved it, too. Stellarium helped me play around with a telescope I had. There is so much joy in playing with a digital, interactive patch of the sky, then being able to look up through a lens and see the real thing a minute later.
As for Stellarium, I fell in love with the countryside aesthetic and how they really went for a VR-type feeling before VR ever became a buzzthing. My favorite features are zooming in and speeding up the clock. Stellarium put a surprising amount of detail into their product, I suggest pushing all of those features to their limits. You will be pleasantly surprised with how far they go.
It’s really handy for astrophotographers, too - I use Astroplanner to chuck together a list of potential targets for a given night or set of nights, then check them out in stellarium, where I’ve imported my actual horizon from my site, and my scope and camera combinations for framing - means I can ensure I’m not wasting time trying to image something obscured by trees or terrain - I’m in a Y shaped valley with a horizon that goes from 10 to 50 degrees which makes this impossible to sensibly automate.
The it’s just on to an SGP sequence, and let it run.
really went for a VR-type feeling before VR ever became a buzzthing
As I remember it, the peak of the VR hype was 1993—SIGGRAPH ’93 was full of the stuff, Snow Crash came out in 1992, and of course Neuromancer had come out in 1984 and True Names came out 1981. Google N-Grams seems to back up this perception: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Virtual+realit...
As for Stellarium, I fell in love with the countryside aesthetic and how they really went for a VR-type feeling before VR ever became a buzzthing. My favorite features are zooming in and speeding up the clock. Stellarium put a surprising amount of detail into their product, I suggest pushing all of those features to their limits. You will be pleasantly surprised with how far they go.