Astronomy Software

I went to a terrific night at my son's school recently with an Astronomy thingy called Starlab. It was a fantastic presentation about the Universe that we can see and all about the stars and their rotation. On our trip to Birdsville and Winton etc, out in the bush the stars were so bright but we knew so little about them that we felt ignorant.

I have seen some software that you can run on your Laptop that will show you the stars from where you are and I was wondering if anyone has experience with these programs and if they know of any that are free (or nearly free). It would be great to be able to sit out in the desert at night and actually know some of the names of the things that we were looking at.

Andrew