Best Astronomy software for PC

[dennisjames1]

Hello everyone, and happy new year! what software do you recommend for the PC. I was leaning towards THE SKY by Steven Bisque, i had it years ago and liked it, and my mate has STARRY NIGHT PRO and it seems ok too, so your opinions gentlemen please, or is there something else? cheers Dennis

[CoombellKid]

I have Starry Night 6 Pro Plus, and have to say I like much better than The
Sky of which I only have ver5. I would list all the things I like about it but
that would take along time to type out. But if I were to choose then Starry
Night Pro Plus 6 would win hands down, just to many usable features that
are handy to amateur astronomers like us. Have a look here and save me
some typing lol

http://store.starrynightstore.com/compare.html

regards,CS sunny days

[Phil]

I use starry night pro plus 6 and love it. You need a big hard drive but because it takes up 11gig. But it is a great program.

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

My suggestion is to find it yourself. Everyone has different opinions about what makes a program suitable to them. I've downloaded dozens of trial versions off the net and found one that I personally like best, & no-one I know has used it here. I asked. I personally use Voyager III from Carina Software out of California. It's very friendly and is more natural to use to my mind. I can set the size and brightness of the higher magnitude stars using a slider, which lets me simply tune what is on screen to look exactly like what I'm actually looking at up there. Nice features such as various intensity night modes too. It's the little things that make it a good choice for me.

Try to download some from here and give them a whirl: http://astro.nineplanets.org/astrosoftware.html but note that some links are broken.

Cheers - and happy hunting
Chris

[jase (Jason)]

This depends on what you want to do... If you simply want a bit of planetarium code to see whats happening in the night, then you can just about use any program available.

I use TheSky 6 Professional. For most folks this software is overkill. I primarily use it to plan an imaging session. I can determine when is the most optimal time to begin imaging and note meridian flips. Perhaps more importantly, I use it to frame the intended object based on telescope focal length and find suitable guide stars within the frame. This saves considerable time hunting around for one at the telescope - This is only an exercise if you have a self-guiding camera (SBIG).

Once planning is complete, TheSky incoordination with ASCOM drivers control the telescope. One nice feature is that if you intend to use TPoint to improve your telescope pointing, it integrates seamlessly (as one would expect).

There are many options available to you. I'd recommending hitting some review sites such as cloudy nights etc.

[sheeny (Al)]

Just to confuse the issue (maybe ) I mostly use Cartes du Ciel. It's free, and for the money, it's brilliant. There may be other packages that are easier to learn and/or use but I've tried a few (like The Sky level 1 (?) that came with my scope, and Deep Sky, Redshift, etc) but found them all much of a muchness. Each just takes a while to learn it's own way of working, so it can be a tedious process selecting a program!

In the end, I chose Cartes du Ciel because it was free, and exceeds my needs. Maybe that will change if start doing something that challenges Cartes's capabilities...

Best of luck! Enjoy playing with all the programs! I'm sure you'll find one that suits you!

Al.

[g__day (Matthew)]

Hi all, its nice to be back in 2007.

To answer the question you need to assess and describe what your needs are. All software performs a function, what functions do you need performed?

There is a pretty extensive list of functions you might desire to cover, and presumably to integrate so all work seamlessly. For instance an advanced users needs might be split into categories that cover:

1. Night sky modelling (plus add ons for satellites or comets)
2. Mount goto control
3. Mount autoguiding control
4. Dome and shutter control (sync'ed to mount control)
5. Focuser control (with an add ons to adjust for temperature variations)
6. Image capture (for anti-blooming or non anti blooming CCD camera support
7. Image processing (with 2-3 major competing offers in each category)

So that gives you seven classes of software with at least 2-3 major offerings in each class, of which at least 3-4 choices you'd like to very tightly integrate. Worst if you are mixing and matching Hardware vendors proprietary gear (non ASCOM) standards, you may need both hardware and software emulators to have one software package drive another vendors gear (e.g. Meade DSI and software driving a Celestron Mount).

So to give you my example I use:

1. Cartes du Ciel (V2), NexStar and Meade Autostar (latest Version)
2. Celestron NexStar, Cartes - via Ascom Driver, Meade Autostar via LX200 emulator V2 with virtual hardware com port, custom cable and Shoestring astronomy LPT port
3. Guidedog, PhD Guiding and Meade Autostar
4. Not there yet, dome isn't motorised and encoded yet
5. JMI PC focuser into Meade model 1209 motor focuser (no encoders), yet to fully integrate with Autostar DSI capture (no temperature adjust yet, but can be done in software)
6. and 7. A whole slew of things I'm considering at the moment, CCDsoft5, MaxIm DL, Registack, Photoshop 6.0, CCDSharp, Mira AP, StellaImage3, IRIS...

There is alot to consider to create a highly automated, and integrated set-up, so how far down this journey do you wish to go over time?

A good read for anyone considering this path is Ron Wodaski's The New CCD Astronomy book.

[ving (David)]

hiya, i use cartes du ceil for all the right reasons

1 its free
2 it shows everything i want it to
3 its easy to use
4 adding catalogues is easy too

[CoombellKid]

Another thing I like about Starry Night Pro Plus 6 is all them weird to say
named stars, constellations..etc...etc... you can right click on them and
select "pronounce" and the lil wave file plays voice recording of how to
pronounce it.

Ving, Starry Night was free for me too, well kind of. I won SNPro Plus 5 up at
Astrofest Qld lol. And then when I tried to get some product support they
had just release version 6 and sent me a free upgrade. cartes du ceil is
excellent for a freebie but it doesn't have near the object info and tools SN
will give you.

regards,CS sunny days