Starry Night (planetarium software) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Starry Night is commercial planetarium

Planetarium

A planetarium is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation...

software, available for Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

and for the iphone. Starry Night focuses heavily on providing attractive, realistic imagery, although recent versions have also increasingly targeted the amateur astronomy

Amateur astronomy

Amateur astronomy, also called backyard astronomy and stargazing, is a hobby whose participants enjoy watching the night sky , and the plethora of objects found in it, mainly with portable telescopes and binoculars...

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.

Features

The following is a list of key features:

Display a realistic night sky
Night sky
The term night sky refers to the sky as seen at night. The term is usually associated with astronomy, with reference to views of celestial bodies such as stars, the Moon, and planets that become visible on a clear night after the Sun has set. Natural light sources in a night sky include moonlight,...

, including stars from the USNO A2 catalogue, the Hipparcos Catalogue, the Tycho-2 Catalogue
Tycho-2 Catalogue
The Tycho-2 Catalogue is a catalogue of more than 2.5 million of the brightest stars.- Catalogue :The astrometric reference catalogue contain positions, proper motions, and two-color photometric data for the 2,539,913 of the brightest stars in the Milky Way, of which about 5000 are visible to the...

, and the Tully
R. Brent Tully
R. Brent Tully is an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii.Tully's specialty is astrophysics of galaxies. He, along with J. Richard Fisher, proposed the now-famous Tully-Fisher relation in a paper, A New Method of Determining Distances to Galaxies, published in Astronomy...

catalogue of galaxies;
View the night sky from any location on Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

or any position in the solar system, the nearby Milky Way
Milky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky...

, or the Local Group
Local Group
The Local Group is the group of galaxies that includes Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way. The group comprises more than 30 galaxies , with its gravitational center located somewhere between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy...

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
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...

objects;
Display of current imagery from solar
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...

and Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

-observing satellite
Satellite
In the context of spaceflight, a satellite is an object which has been placed into orbit by human endeavour. Such objects are sometimes called artificial satellites to distinguish them from natural satellites such as the Moon....

s;
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
Charge-coupled device
A charge-coupled device is a device for the movement of electrical charge, usually from within the device to an area where the charge can be manipulated, for example conversion into a digital value. This is achieved by "shifting" the signals between stages within the device one at a time...

imagery.

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.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Features

Updates

See also

External links