| review: SkyCharts (Cartes du Ciel) - Planetarium, Star Chart and Telescope Control Program ( € 0,- freeware ) |
Latest news 25.10.2002
Version 2.75 is available!
The Horsehaed Nebula (for example) is now a true shaped outline and the planets are displayed at high reolution bitmaps.
This software is truely amazing!
It can compete even with the most expensive software on the market.
The french author tells us, we shall spent our money on good optics, not on software :)
Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Chevalley!
What's in the sky tonight?
The first thing to do is to have a look what's in the sky tonight.
I first press the *south* button to get an overview.
The stars look like on a photo made with a refractor.
They can be changed to a newtonian style with diffraction pattern and several more options.
The stars show the color of their actual spectrum.
The lower dark area is the horizon given by my observatory and the surrounding.
You can input the corresponding angles and heights into a special text file very easiliy to simulate your real view.
To the right there is the Milkyway nicely plotted.
The whole look and feel can be configuered to the own needs in a high degree.
A big number of catalogues for stars, galaxies, nebula, comets and even the precise position of the other planet's moons can be downloaded and used with the program.
There is even support for RealSky® (or your own!) pictures to be shown in stead of the galaxy or nebula symbols.
Here is an example of M51 from the author's website.
I've got it!
If you have found an object of interest click it:
SkyCharts shows a complete description of the object.
You can now center it and magnify it to a size similar to your finder circles or ccd frame field of view:
The program can display up to 10 finder circles (or eyepiece field of view) plus 10 combinations of ccd frames and focal lengths.
In my case these are the Telrad circles and the f.o.v. of my HX916 with 80mm, 200mm, 650mm and 1024 mm of focal length.
It can be seen that for a full shot of Andromeda I would have to use the fl of 80mm.
Finding Tools
Objects can also be found by this tool:
In the solar system finder there is not only the planets, sun and moon but also asteroids and comets.
Or if you know the sky and the constellations you might prefer this tool:
Just point and click to this 360 degree representation of the sky and the main windows will show this place in the formerly used magnification.
Telescope Control
If one has a GoTo mount like the LX200 it is controlable by SkyCharts too:
More interfaces for other telescopes can be downloaded.
For a full description of the thousands of features look at his homepage: http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/.
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