Stellarium is one of the finest pieces of software of its kind!
And now it has been updated to 0.9.1!
I used this to learn the night sky.

What is Stellarium?
Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.
You can down load Stellarium HERE

Do you use a LapTop out in the field?
Do you need something to keep your night vision?

I just came across this (FREE) program that is pretty slick
DarkAdapted
DarkAdapted is a gamma control application program. It modifies your screen gamma settings so that you may, for example, preserve your dark adaptation while using your computer.

Stellarium
Is another can’t live without.
What it does is
Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real-time. With stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.

Some features:

– Over 120000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue with name and infos for the
brightest ones,
– Planets in real time, with a powerful zoom mode to see them like in a
telescope,
– Drawing of the 88 constellations with their names,
– Drawing of more than 40 messiers objects (Orion, M31 etc..),
– Photorealistic Milky Way,
– Ground, fog, and landscape,
– Clickable stars, planets and nebulas with informations,
– Windowed and fullscreen modes.

I just upgraded to the DeepSky DVD version.
Was it worth it?
Oh yes it was worth every cent.
You know sometimes when you are at the EP you really don’t know what you are looking for.
You know where to look but not what to look for.
The DeepSky DVD version is the answer, it has over 400,000 images.

Out in the field I have spent hours looking for an object like NGC6144
( its a small cluster in Scorpius BTW I have not found NGC6144 to date but at least now I know what to look for)
While I could spend hours searching on line for pictures of the nights object list I don’t have to DeepSky has it all right there at my finger tip.
If you are looking for a star charting program take a look at Deepsky Astronomy Software

I have tried and used a lot of different software.
I’ve got to say that DeepSky
Is top notch.
I used it to make a (BINOS) star chart for the wife.
I have printed out over 100 pages of charts.
One of the things I like is its “Observing Planner”.
I set up the 4 seasons plan, it was a snap.
It keeps track of your viewing log too.
I have not even begun to explore everything it does