Starry Night (planetarium software)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Starry Night | |
|---|---|
 Starry Night Screen Shot |
|
| Developed by | Imaginova |
| Latest release | 6.2 / ? |
| OS | Mac OS X, Windows |
| Genre | planetarium |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | http://www.starrynight.com/ |
Starry Night is a commercial planetarium software program, available for both Mac OS X and Windows. 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 Imaginova.
[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
