Topic: Astronomy Without A Telescope – Home Made Quark-Gluon Soup

[Simon]

 

[Clive]

   I'm surprised such old software works at all on Win 7.  I hope you managed to catch Mars when it was recently at its brightest.  Right now Saturn is at its best but you can't see the rings this year.  Venus is starting to return to the evening sky but it's not a particularly good apparition this time.  However, Mercury will put on a good show at the end of the month/beginning of next month and will be very easy to find in the western sky just after sunset.

[sam]

Bloody Astronomy without a bloody telescope.  I've just spent several hours trying to get Starry Night 6 CSAP to co-operate with Windows 7.  After jumping through more hoops than a hoopery, I eventually succeeded only by resorting to harsh language.  I'm now going out into the back garden - to scream.

this is pretty cool: http://www.stellarium.org/

[Clive]

Yes, it's very good and best of all it's free!   

[Rodders]

That seems very reasonable.  Sadly, I'm getting a mixture of 404s and stalled pageloads when looking around their site.  I'll have another go from home later.  Meanwhile, can anyone advise whether it's actually better than SN?

[Clive]

I can remember reviewing Starry Night for Astronomy Now magazine many years ago and thought it was disappointing.   But that would have been a very early version and they stopped asking me to do reviews not long afterwards.    A lot of people are very complimentary towards Stellarium and I know Sam is one of them.  I don't use any astronomy software these days mainly because I was tee'd off after paying £120 for Sky 3.1 on floppies back in 1990 and it wouldn't work when I upgraded to Win 95.   

[Rodders]

How much?   

I must confess that I can't remember ever paying for software that came on floppies.  Mind you, that's not to say I didn't have any.

[Clive]

It came on 6 x 3.5" discs, but the good thing about it was it could easily be copied and I dished out loads to anyone who wanted them.  For its time, it was exceptionally good software and fun to use.  The Win 95 version was on CD and was only £14 to buy.  After forking out all that money for 3.1 I refused to buy it but then a magazine dished out free copies of it! It was probably a stripped down version of the real thing because it was nowhere near as good as the version I paid £120 for. 

[sam]

I paid quite a bit (around £80) for Starry Night a few years back and indeed this is a very good program especially if you use it for logs or linking to a scope. However, I'd never pay again. I find the software overly slow and Stellarium is just as good - if not better in many ways. However, if you've got SN working giving it a proper go - but I'd seriously recommend having a play with Stellarium, the price is right and you'll probably get a more intuitive view of the sky. Of course - you can always use Google Earth and press the sky button. That's quite good but not quite right.

[Rodders]

Thanks for your input Sam.  Since I plan to use SN for nothing more adventurous than locating and (kind of) observing major events, there's probably no real need for anything I'd need to use a brain on.  The best thing therefore is for me download Stellarium in the next few days and compare both programs on the brain-strain scale.

I'll be back...   

[Clive]

 

[sam]

Thanks for your input Sam.  Since I plan to use SN for nothing more adventurous than locating and (kind of) observing major events, there's probably no real need for anything I'd need to use a brain on.  The best thing therefore is for me download Stellarium in the next few days and compare both programs on the brain-strain scale.

I'll be back...   

I'd expect you might find Stellarium more intuitive. Of course there is also heavens-above.com -which shows the sky from your location on a map and when satellites are going over.