I know this should be in another forum,but I thgink I may get better feed back here.
I have "The Sky SIX" and am not happy with it's accuracy of star fields and magnitude of stars.
when I observe I find it quite a lot of times it doesn't agree with what I see in FOV in my scope.
Can any one recommend a good free program, or even one I can purchase.?
Prefer the free one of course
I am doing comet observations and reports and need good reference stars that agree with what I am seeing.
One gets fed up having to go and check stars in catalogues to find they are quite different than what "The Sky" says.
Cheers
Hi Ron, I know for the iPad/iPhone you can get a free version of the basic Sky Safari 4, it's called Sky Portal. Being a beginner I have tried many apps and found this to be the best for my needs.
EDIT I'm assuming you mean an app, if you mean a computer program there is of course Stellarium, CDC etc
Hi Ron, I know for the iPad/iPhone you can get a free version of the basic Sky Safari 4, it's called Sky Portal. Being a beginner I have tried many apps and found this to be the best for my needs.
EDIT I'm assuming you mean an app, if you mean a computer program there is of course Stellarium, CDC etc
Thanks Johnny, No not basic stuff, I need good star information and proper star fields.
Ipad and other apps are not applicable,need for computer.
I would like feedback on those programs you mentioned as to their quality.
Cheers
Ron, look at CdC, C2A, Hallo Northern Sky, Guide9, and Stellarium. All except Guide9 are free.
When it comes to star information and star fields all except Stellarium will let you use UCAC4 and possibly NOMAD. CdC has a "fairly simple" means of adding any catalog in Simbad/Vizier you like.
I have all of them as well as TheSky6. My favourite is CdC followed by Guide9. If you want to discuss at length we can take it offline.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris85
The latest Sky at Night has a good write up of Starry Night Pro which might be what you're looking for?
Starry Night Pro+ 7 is not cheap (except as an upgrade from SNP+6) and still rather flakey.
Ron, look at CdC, C2A, Hallo Northern Sky, Guide9, and Stellarium. All except Guide9 are free.
When it comes to star information and star fields all except Stellarium will let you use UCAC4 and possibly NOMAD. CdC has a "fairly simple" means of adding any catalog in Simbad/Vizier you like.
I have all of them as well as TheSky6. My favourite is CdC followed by Guide9. If you want to discuss at length we can take it offline.
Starry Night Pro+ 7 is not cheap (except as an upgrade from SNP+6) and still rather flakey.
Cheers Andrew, I will have a look at them on Google and see what they look like.
I used to have a "Friends Copy" of Starry Night Pro and didn't like it that much, in fact it irritated the hell out of me
I have always been a bit of a fan of "The Sky" but since I have been doing comet reports find it doesn't do the job I want it to do.
Cheers
I've always wondered how accurate Stellarium is. I've downloaded the extra databases. It's just that sometimes the stars don't seen to match my photos exactly?
Attached is a photo of the field around Aldebaran: the image on
the left is from Cartes du Ciel with the UCAC3 star catalog, the
image on the right is taken from another forum:
The stars match up "pretty well", except that the catalog is missing
some of the stars. (Even some of the brighter stars not near the magnitude
limit of the catalog are missing from the CdC chart.)
Let's post some similar screenshots from other planetarium programs
so we can determine which program and which catalog shows stars best.
Yes, I meant to say that the CdC screenshot shows UCAC3 in conjunction
with the bright-star catalogues. (For instance, you can see that Aldebaran
is shown on the chart.)
As for UCAC4, it does fill in some stars missing in UCAC3:
But CdC restricts downloads of UCAC4 to only stars visible from my
latitude -- until they remove this restriction, I'm sticking with UCAC3.
If you want to compare star fields in planetarium programs, one suggestion
is to burn a live DVD of Distro Astro 3.0 and try it out without installation. It
has Cartes du Ciel (with a large custom DSO catalog), KStars, and Stellarium
already installed, but only the brightest stars of the minimal installation are
included with each program. Then compare the star fields in each program
with photographs.
Can you explain your comment:
But CdC restricts downloads of UCAC4 to only stars visible from my
latitude -- until they remove this restriction, I'm sticking with UCAC3.
I've downloaded the UCAC4 catalogue for CdC and have full sky coverage.
UCAC4 would add missing stars and improve my sample chart. I haven't installed UCAC4 yet because maybe I'm misreading the ambiguous comment on the UCAC4 download page:
"You can get only the stars visible for you. i.e. a northern hemisphere observer can get only the North and Equator files."
Sounds like this means, "You can choose to get only the stars visible to you..."
But getting back to the main thread: my experience is that CdC has the best display of stars -- the other freebie programs show the stars as tiny pixels that are difficult to distinguish from each other. (Check out screenshots of HNSky for the most obvious example.) Most planetarium programs have contrast/brightness settings to change the appearance of the stars, though, so the verdict is still out on the planetarium program that "best" displays stars.
But CdC restricts downloads of UCAC4 to only stars visible from my
latitude -- until they remove this restriction, I'm sticking with UCAC3.
The CdC downloads for the big UCAC catalogs are split into northern, southern and equatorial. Suit yourself if you want some or all. They extract into the one set of directories and the index which is in all three parts covers all declinations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Merlin66
I've downloaded the UCAC4 catalogue for CdC and have full sky coverage.
I got my UCAC4 DVD (double sided) direct from the USNO. I could dup it onto a couple of DVDs if someone wants a copy.
Attached is a screenshot of the field in UCAC3 (left) and UCAC4 (right).
It's easy to pick out stars that UCAC3 missed and match them to the
previous photograph of the field (the brightest star at 10 o'clock from the
cursor, for example).
Thanks for recommending the upgrade to UCAC4.
Cometcatcher, you can do a similar comparison with a photograph to test
the accuracy of star brightnesses in Stellarium (or any other planetarium
program).
