Celestia

It may well have been posted before, but I found this a couple of weeks ago (and only got around to downloading it last night).

"... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.
All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.
Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects."


You can zoom out from the Milky Way and zoom in on other galaxies. Unfortunately, seeing stars in other galaxies is quite impossible, but, well, yeah...

You can speed up time, too, and follow Halley's Comet. I personally think it's quite brilliant. Not to mention that you can add in Solar Systems of your own.