Grant,
There's heaps of planetarium software available for us astro types nowadays. They range from the free up to the expensive. Some of them even control your telescope and can be used to plan and capture images, too.
A couple of freebies that you might like to check out are Cartes du Ciel, and another one is Stellarium (this one is very popular with quite a few users on this site).
Other good ones include SkyVoyager, TheSky6 (deprecated), and TheSkyX. My personal favourite is Starry Night Pro Plus 6. Here's a screenshot showing the detail that SNPP6 conveys:
http://users.tpg.com.au/octane2/snpp6.html
Cheers.
H