You may change the location from where you are looking at the sky to almost any place on earth. Switching to the United States for instance changed the beautiful morning in Paris to a great view of the nightsky in that region of the world. Additional information like Nebulas, grids and constellations can be added to the view.

Stellarium is a fantastic application that teaches about the stars on the one hand and displays beautiful images on the other hand. Great for everyone with even a slight interested in astronomy.

You need Shockwave in order to view the page. Enjoy the show :)

Update: The page the app was running on is still available, the Shockwave app on the other hand is no longer embedded on the page. As a consequence, the link to the site has been removed from this article.

Update 2: The application is available again. Head over to the website to fly through the sky. You will see clouds and the sky once it loads.

Use your mouse to increase or decrease the flying speed, to change direction or to fly backwards. Everything is handled with the left mouse button and the mouse.

You can fly into a specific direction by moving the mouse cursor into that direction. You change the flying speed with a click on the mouse button. Once you click and hold down, you will see a bar that is either green (forward) or red (backwards).

While it may be soothing for a moment to fly through the sky in a web browser, you will notice that the landscape is repetitive and that you cannot do anything else besides changing speed and direction. There is also no way to change the perspective’s altitude, for instance by diving into the clouds. The perspective is always the same.