Starry Night (planetarium software)
 Starry Night screenshot |
|
| Developer(s) | Simulation Curriculum |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 6.4.4 / 28 February 2011 |
| Operating system | Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows |
| Type | Planetarium |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www.starrynight.com |
Starry Night is commercial planetarium software, available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and for the iphone. Starry Night focuses heavily on providing attractive, realistic imagery, although recent versions have also increasingly targeted the amateur astronomy community with features like observation planning, telescope control, and multiple-panel printing.
Initially developed by Sienna Software, Starry Night is now owned and developed by Simulation Curriculum Corp., a Minneapolis-based publisher of educational curriculum and software.
Contents |
[edit] Features
The following is a list of key features:
- Display a realistic night sky, including stars from the USNO A2 catalogue, the Hipparcos Catalogue, the Tycho-2 Catalogue, and the Tully catalogue of galaxies;
- View the night sky from any location on Earth or any position in the solar system, the nearby Milky Way, or the Local Group of galaxies;
- Display any date and time for thousands of years in the past and future;
- Animate time forwards or backwards at any rate;
- Create observing plans;
- Calculate ephemerides of solar system objects;
- Display of current imagery from solar and Earth-observing satellites;
- Generate a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of the displayed stars;
- Control most popular GOTO telescopes through a serial interface cable;
- Display the sky using an all-sky photographic mosaic created from CCD imagery.
[edit] Updates
The first significant update was 6.0.6 that added the support needed for the program to run properly on Windows Vista. Release 6.3.3 fixes some bugs in the program and adds updates to the database as well as some enhancements. Users are advised to download the latest driver of their graphics card in order to reduce the probability of graphical corruption not fixed in the update. The latest release (6.4.3) improves updater performance, corrects some printing bugs, and allows better CPU management.
[edit] See also
- Cartes du Ciel
- Celestia
- Digital Universe Atlas
- Google Sky
- Hallo Northern Sky
- RedShift
- Stellarium
- KStars
- XEphem
- WinStars
- WorldWide Telescope
- TheSky
