"Twinkle, twinkle little star and the big moon, I wonder how you are," My three year old sings as we sit on the front porch watching the sky. I never thought I would ever be able to find the constellations in the sky like this. I did not know one star from another before we studied the Starry Night Complete Space & Astronomy Pack.

This pack is very thorough. As a person who has never studied astronomy or had an interest in it because it all sounded to complicated for me, I really enjoyed it. The pack included Starry Night Companion Book (a bonus), 4 discs: Starry Night Software (discs 1&2), Deep Space Explorer (disc 3), and Sky Theater (disc 4).

This program is great for us beginners in astronomy. The Starry Night: Complete Space & Astronomy Pack is a planetarium for your computer. After you install and register your program you can put in your location and then you can view the sky in your area at anytime night or day that you want too. After we watched SkyTheater and the guided tours of the solar system, we printed out star maps and took them out to the lake where there was no city lights. I couldn't believe how easy it was to locate the constellations with the star map. Not only can you view the sky from anywhere you can also select what time you would like to view, then you can print out star charts for that exact time to take outside with you.

The Sky Theater takes you on a voyage through the solar system. The movies are divided into sections; they also have very good graphics. The Earth Zone section took us to the moon, showed us the satellites and shuttles, did you know they can be seen one or two hours before or after sunset or sunrise? The other movie in this section tells about meteorites. Where do you think a good place on earth would be to find meteors would be? You will be surprised where it is, I was. The Earth Zone is only one section on the Sky Theater DVD. My children enjoyed Sky Theater because they had fun; they felt like they were on a space ship touring the solar system.

Teaching the solar system to the children was easy with this program because it kept their attention. The Deep Space Explorer is like driving your own space ship through the solar system. You pilot a starship through the solar system while exploring 28,00 galaxies. This program is great for all ages; it is for anyone who wants to learn astronomy. To use this program you need a computer with windows XP or Macintosh Os x 10.3or higher and a DVD player.



-- Product Review by: Judy Wales, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine