Starry Night Pro 4

Deepsky Database

Starry Night uses the Tycho2, Hipparcos and as the Starry Night manual puts it ?an additional database for dim stars not included in the Hipparcos or Tycho catalogs. This database includes about 19 million stars and has stars as dim as 15th magnitude?. Gee what is that? Could it be the GSC version 1 or maybe version 1.1 or is it version 1.2. Come on! Stating the exact name of the stellar catalog isn?t going to make an experienced astronomy enthusiast brain explode. In fact it is extremely important for us to know what catalog is in use so we can account for its known errors so we can adequately partake in experienced astronomy enthusiast activities. Also the manual states ?Starry Night Pro actually allows you to access an even larger database, which contains 500 million stars! This database is far too large to fit on a CD, so Starry Night Pro allows you to download portions of this database from the Internet?. What database is that? From an educated guess that might be either the USNO A1.0 or A2.0 version. No clue though. Some experienced astronomy enthusiast needs to know this for some projects.

The deepsky database of extended objects that comes with Starry Night Pro as compared to many other astronomical software which most cost much less is a disgrace and falls far below what has become expected since the mid 90?s. Starry Night Pro only plots the Messier, NGC/IC, 60,000 galaxies of the PGC catalog, PK planetary nebula, all known supernova remnants, UGC catalog of 13,000 galaxies which most over lap with the NGC and PGC and 18,000 Quasars and a few others that for the most part over lap with the above catalogs.

You might be thinking that is a lot of objects and I can never see all of those with my telescope. That is very true however there are many, many, many deep sky objects absent from Starry Night that not only can be seen in a humble pair of binoculars or a small 6 inch telescope but they are so breathtakingly beautiful they will bring you to tears. Even though Starry Night Pro has many objects that you cannot see wouldn?t it be nice if it at least had a database of all objects the experienced astronomy enthusiast can see or image.


For comparison here is the deepsky database of the $89 program Guide 8. I am only giving the databases Starry Night does not include. Also in all the catalogs given the experienced astronomy enthusiast with a six or eight inch telescope can see visually or image many objects within those catalogs. The Sharpless, Lynds Bright Nebula, Van Den Bergh, Barnard dark nebula, LDN dark nebula, Abell Planetary, Antalova, Auner, Aveni-Hunter, Basel, Berkeley, Biurakan, Blanco, Collinder, Czernik, Danks, Dolidze, Dol-Dzim, Feinstein, Graff, Graham, Grasdalen, Haffner, Harvard, Havlen-Moffat, Hogg, Iskudarian, King, Latysev, Loden, Lynga, Markarian, Mayer, Melotte, Moffat, Muzzio, Pismis, Roslund, Ruprecht, Schuster, Sher, Stephenson, Stock, Tombaugh, Trumpler, Upgren, VandenBergh, VandenBergh-Hagen, Waterloo, Westerlund, Arp-Madore, Palomar, Terzan, Abell galaxy cluster, Zwicky galaxy clusters and a few other catalogs. Other lower cost software such as DeepSky 2003 $50, Skytools 2 $99, Skymap Pro $99 and the free program Cartes du Ciel have most if not all of the above catalogs that Starry Night Pro $179 for the experienced astronomy enthusiast does not have. These catalogs have become expected and standard and there is no excuse for a much higher priced program targeted towards the experienced astronomy enthusiast to omit those databases.

To be fair you can add these objects. However Starry Night Pro requires a somewhat rigid text format with a bunch of semi cryptic headers. It is a lot of work and a lot of effort and not worth the trouble given the fact you can spend $79 to $100 less for software that have a complete database to begin with.

Lack of deepsky objects is not the only deepsky woes of Starry Night Pro. Many objects belong to several different catalogs. Starry Night does not cross index those catalogs so if you activate some of those multiple catalogs you get multiple symbols for the object. This makes the chart look very messy, hard to read and unprofessional. Most lower cost software live, breath and eat cross indexing for clean, nice and great one symbol per object charts. I think it is a flat out disgrace that Starry Night doesn?t cross index. Starry Night does clam to be advanced software for the advanced amateur it should cross index no exceptions.

Animation

Animation is awesome in Starry Night. It is extremely smooth without the jerk, jerk of many other programs. The controls are also very intuitive. There is a time bar with the month, day, year, hours, minutes and seconds. You can click on one of the above time settings and use the arrow keys on the keyboard to go forward or back in time. For example you can click on the minutes and push the up arrow and advance the time in minutes. Also Starry Night has the traditional stop, step forward/backward and contentious forward/backward buttons that many other traditional software have. The buttons look similar to a tape recorder or a VCR that we are all familiar with. There is a wide variety of step sizes that range from 1X to 30,000X or from seconds to years.

Here is what you can do with the animation feature. You can use it to watch the stars rise and set. Watch the moon, planets and the sun move across the sky. You can also tell Starry Night to display a motion trail which can be either local path or celestial path. You have complete control of step size. You can hover over the Earth and watch the moon orbit it or over the sun and watch the planets orbit it. Get this! You can animate the motion of stars in the Tycho 2 catalog. This will allow you to see stars move over a period of a few thousand years. It is fun to watch the constellations distort over time.

The animation feature not only helps calculate what you can see in the future but Starry Night adds many other features that aids as a learning tool.

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