This interactive display of the naked eye sky was written for making slides for presentations. You may find it useful for similar purposes.
All 5,000 stars down to magnitude 6.0 in the Hipparcos data set are plotted as realistically as possible. The entire celestial sphere is shown and it can be dragged to any position with the mouse. Constellations are outlined and labelled.
The following features can be switched off and back on again by selection from a context menu (right click) or by single key short-cuts.
The following features are initially switched off but can be switched on and off.
There are also a few other menu options.
The star identifier display is a new feature. Also new is an initial prompt for an epoch, which applies precession so that, for example, the display will rotate about pole positions as they were thousands of years ago or will be in future.
The Java code may also be run as a desk-top application on your own system, in which case additional menu options become available for saving displays as PNG image files (security requirements prevent applets from doing that). To do it you need to download this file: NakedEyeSky.jar, saving it in a directory of your choice. Then from that directory issue the command java -jar NakedEyeSky.jar In Windows you could put the command in a file called NakedEyeSky.bat and then "open" that file. In other systems there are similar mechanisms.