A colleague just gave me an article on this software. Does anyone know about it? It is about $69 but dont know if that's US$ Is it worth the money and what does it show??
I use an older version of Starry night and I love it! The official website is here if you want to see some features/screenshots, or even movies showing it's features.
I have Starry Night Pro 5, and it stuffs my whole computer up! Takes about 3 minutes to open, then each and every action takes about 1 minute to load (even just moving the stars a few pixels!!!). Then it takes about 5 mins to exit!!!!! Nothing else on the pooter will work while it is running, and nothing works properly for about 20 mins after exiting!
I have just got SN Pro plus 6.0. Wicked. No other word for it. Turn off the Real Sky thing but other than that, awesome. OK, that's two words for it, but...
Only problem I had with Starry Night before I got rid of it (thankfully) was that I was constantly hounded by damn them in the form of unsolicited emails - even though I checked the "do not" box on registration. They never stopped sending them until I personally rang and spoke with their marketing manager in Canada. I could have blocked them, but the point was that I didn't want them so why were they ignoring that request?
Apart from that, the software (enthusiast version) was very limited but OK. I wish it had night vision mode - but you didn't get that until you went up to the more expensive versions.
I reckon that the free packages like Cartes du Ciel are far better - and free.
I have Pro Plus 6 and love it. It runs quickly and seemlessly on my Mac and causes no problems. It's not the best software for printing star maps to use in the field but in terms of visual realism it's the best available, just stunning. It has an overlay all-sky photograph option which is slow to load as you zoom in. I normally turn this off but it is useful too at times. There's a great field-of-view option that you can set up for each telescope/eyepiece/camera option you have.
I agree with Graeme - this software seems to run far more reliably and is far better presented when running on a Mac. I ran it on both and where the XP machine gave me problems (hangs, etc) the OSX 10.4 Mac just ran it as though it was designed to do so from the start.
