Starry Night Pro 4

Travel

Starry Night is a little different then many other astronomical software. In Starry Night You can travel to any location in the universe up to 700,000 light years away. You can travel to any planet and moon in the solar system. You can also view planets such as Jupiter or Saturn and watch their moons orbit their respective planets from any angle. This can be done for the solar system as well. You can also stand on any planet, moon and even the sun and see how the sky looks from that planet.

That?s not all! As mentioned above you can travel to any location up to 700,000 light years away. Want to know what the constellation of Orion looks like from Deneb? You can go to Deneb and find out. What does the Milky Way look like from the Andromeda Galaxy? You can travel there as well.

Starry Night uses the Tycho 2 database which has 3D positional data for stars down to 12th magnitude. Also it uses the Tully database for 3D positional for 28,000 galaxies. This gives a view of stars and galaxies streaming towards you as you fly out. Plus you can view them three dimensionally.

Solar System

Like most astronomical software Starry Night Pro plots all planets in our solar system. They are not just symbols. They are photorealistic 3D renderings. Many of the features are shown including the Great Red Spot so you can predict what features you can see. Starry Night Pro plots all known moons at the time of its release. With Jupiter?s 4 larger moons Starry Night Pro will tell you where they are plus it will display transits, eclipse, occultations and shadows being cast. Since Starry Night Pro plots all known moons you can use that data to predict when you can observe those as well. There are many that cannot be visually seen but I still like the fact Starry Night plots them because it is cool to see how many of the lesser known moons orbit their planets as well. Also, and here is the cool part, many of the moons are photorealistic 3D rendered with many features shown.

The program comes with a database of 150 comets which can be added to. The symbol for a comet is pretty cool. It looks real. Just look at the screen shot. Every now and then Starry Night will log onto the net and download comet updates that the developers of Starry Night put together. This works ok but there can be a delay for a comet to be added. Fortunately Starry Night has a nice orbital editor where you can add the comets.

Starry Night plots some asteroids. I have no clue how many because the web site and manual doesn?t say. From the looks of it the database is nowhere near as large as Guide version 8 or Skytools. There were many asteroids I found in Guide that I could not locate in Starry Night. The auto update may add a few newly discovered asteroids here and there or you can add them one by one in the orbital editor.

Added:  Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Reviewer:  Shawn Grant
Score:
Related Link:  http://www.starrynight.com/
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