Ahhhh, I found a review about Hallo Northern Sky!
Hallo Northern Sky
Despite the name, Hallo Northern Sky is for the whole sky.
I appreciate first this software for its ergonomy, the ease to change parameters and for the display of the target parameters in the upper left of the screen. Positive side while you zoom in more faint stars appear, not always well differenciated, but this is a performance to highlight as it is not always programmed in freeware products. At any moment you can bolden the star appearance and reduce or extend the limit magnitude. Couterpoint when zoom out, all faint stars continue to be displayed, whitening your screen. You have to reset the limit magnitude to get a more realistic sky.
DSO are listed not as empty shapes but are filled, presenting a grey surface a bit similar to the Catalog of Principal Galaxies to simulate their appearance at the eyepiece; an excellent initiative usually available on high-end products and loading expensives CD's.
Better than other freeware, Hallo provides a Search tool to find planets or their satellites, stars, constellations, DSO (Messier, IC and NGC) but also a hundred comets and so many asteroids. As for many small programs, 433 Eros although of magnitude 12 is not listed. The zoom is also powerful. You select an area with a right-clic of the mouse to center it and you zoom by clicking on the IN or OUT menu. Double stars have not been forgotten and the double-double epsilon Lyrae-1 appears well when the true field decreases below around 18' and magnitude below 8.
There also two very useful tools. First the fact you can move around the sky using the arrows. Even displaying all objects the refresh is very fast. The second tool is the accelerated motion which is available using F-keys. Very useful to find a conjunction or the accurate position of an asteroid for example among stars.
Hallo is now at version 2.04 and runs fine on Windows 32-bit platforms in high resolution, better than some high-end products.
It is free with 26000 deepsky objects and all stars to magnitude 12 and with the original GSC CD's, GSC-ACT or the USNO UCAC2 to magnitude 16. It displays all planets, the Moon, Sun, moons of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Uranus and Neptune and a few hundred asteroids and comets. It comes with 255 small DSS (r) deepsky images which will blend in at the right size and orientation. Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies. Contains 23011 galaxies.
Hmmmm, sounds pretty good to me
Downloading now
