For me the beauty of the night sky is at least as great as what we see during the day. I strongly recommend spending some time watching it if you haven't lately.
I have been playing with a few planetarium programs for a review article and can recommend two programs for people who are beginning to observe the stars as well as those who have an intermediate level of experience. Both of these programs are from the same company and run well on my Ti Powerbook (667MHz) under OS X 10.2.3.
For the beginner there are few programs that can match Starry Night Backyard 4.X. The interface is well done as planetarium programs go and the manual is well written and a bit over two hundred pages. This would be great for a curious fifth grader as well as an adult to wants to understand the night sky more deeply.
Starry Night Pro is built on the same interface as Backyard, but adds several deep sky object databases as well as online access to a few of the more important object databases. If you have a modern telescope you can control the telescope from the program (Meade Autostar and Celestron Nexstar series).
There are more specialized programs for serious amatuers, but I haven't found anything better for folks who aren't out with their telescopes ten days a month or more.
A few months ago I commented on Starry Night Pro to a friend who happens to be a well known cosmologist at Cal Tech. Being a world class expert doesn't mean you know your way around the sky and, at nearly sixty, he dediced it was finally time to learn. He is so delighted that this Summer he plans to buy a small telescope to put his newly acquired knowledge to better use. From an email:
Most people sleep, watch a movie, work on their spreadsheets or read a novel while flying but I'm spending most of my time working with the planetarium program on my Powerbook. It is remarkable that someone who makes a living thinking about the universe basically didn't know what it looks like to human eyes from the Earth. I'm having the
Not only is this marvelous fun, but I suspect I know more about the visual sky than most of my colleagues.
1:12:54 PM 
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