During high school, I interned and volunteered at a planetarium and had my own 6 inch telescope. In college my major was Astrophysics, the result of a childhood dream of understanding the stars, the galaxies, and the universe. I have always been fascinated by space and it's wonderful to now have at my fingertips more information and better images than even the telescopes at UCLA displayed. Now I can surf the universe with the click of a mouse.

We'll start our own tour with the newly upgraded Hubble space telescope. You can view constantly updated images taken by this amazing telescope at the Hubble main site. You'll see incredible images of planets in our own backyard, as well as images the most distant object ever photographed, A1689-zD1, a galaxy over 13 billion years old. I recommend you take the image tour in the gallery section.

If you are just looking for good information about space, Space.com is a great resource for you and your kids to learn about the planets and the universe around us.

Now, if you are looking for a little more of an interactive experience, check out a couple of free desktop planetariums: Google Sky and Celestia.

I'll start with Google Sky, which can be find through your friendly internet browser at www.google.com/sky. This is a fairly easy to use web based planetarium that has great images but not a lot of detail. The information has also been integrated into Google Earth, a downloadable application that lets you explore high resolution images of Earth, as well as switching to a sky mode where you can intuitively explore space. Guided tours and layers of information make this a rich resource.

If you want to learn more about space and explore the way the planets move, you should download Celestia. This is an amazing piece of open source software. With it you can explore over 100,000 stars, galaxies and the solar system, down to orbiting satellites. You can easily move anywhere in the 3-d space, zooming in to distant stars, exploring the moons of Saturn, or speeding up time and watching the dance of the planets as the tirelessly orbit the sun. If you want, you can even extend Celestia with more objects and detail, the collection of expansions available can add everything from more stars to detailed night-side pictures of Earth. They also offer scripts which can be loaded in Celestia and played like guided tours. To top it all off, you can capture images and even movies of your explorations which can make this a great help for your kid's school science projects. The program itself definitely requires a bit of practice to get used to the controls, but once you do it's easy to position yourself above the International Space Station, speed up time to 1000 times normal, and watch the Earth rotate beneath you as the Sun rises and sets over and over.

Celestia is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, so everyone can enjoy this excellent free software.

As Picard would say "Engage!"