The "Pro" heading here is a little exaggerated - Starry Night: Enthusiast is for amateurs with telescopes who do astronomy regularly, but not too heavily. The Pro and this, the Pro Plus editions, are for amateurs for whom it's a serious hobby that takes up a fair amount of their spare time. It's much more than a planetarium, though as we'll come back to, it's still a great way to find out what's what in the night sky. There's a 192 page book (the Starry Night Companion) which isn't great, but you can't complain as it's effectively free. There's SkyTheater, a DVD of mini-features covering around 2/3 of the excellent Atlas of the Sky DVD, and there's Starry Night itself. The stunning planetarium has much more information than the even the Pro version - showing an incredible 55 million stars (500+ million online) and a million galaxies. there's the excellent Sky Calendar that details all the upcoming notable events you will be able to see, and around 100 superb interactive explorations (30 more than Enthusiast). Oh and there's a neat astronomical dictionary, plus a "fly around" spaceship feature like Deep Space Explorer. Like the Pro edition, Pro Plus also has an Ephemeris generator, providing location data for any object over a specific time span, and 180 degree, full sky charts. The special features you get by going for Pro Plus rather than Pro are themselves very attractive. Perhaps the most impressive visual aspect is its full colour photograph of the entire night sky, to a limiting magnitude of 14-15. This is a mosaic of around 20,000 images taken with a 6 megapixel camera, and does give a stunning representation of the star field. There's also a useful addition if you have the MaxIm DL imaging software. Pictures taken through your telescope and processed with MaxIM DL can then be integrated into Starry Night to form part of the visual support in the program. This is for Windows users only, but Mac users get their own unique feature with a "telescope handbox simulator" that allows you to move your linked telescope to any position. There's better telescope linking too in the telescope control window - and some rather elegant horizon photo-realistic horizon panoramas. Oh, and along with the newer versions of the lower editions of the software as they are released, there's joystick control when you are moving around the sky in spaceship mode.ĭespite all the bells and whistles, Starry Night remains at its heart an excellent planetarium program that brings up on your PC or Mac a view of the night sky that is simply brilliant. It's a clear, crisp, image, the controls are mostly intuitive and some of the extras are a delight. Constellations can be brought up in stick form, or (for the major ones) with a very effective graphic image.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |