A Conversation for Jimi X's Observatory is Closed
Great Software
beeline Started conversation Feb 21, 2000
Nice to meet other stargazers! There must be a few of us on this site, I should guess...
Can I recommend that absolutely everyone tries a piece of software called Starry Night, available from http://www.siennasoft.com. It's a thoroughly excellent and usable night-sky viewer for anywhere in the Solar System. It' fast, has the best interface of pretty much any program I've ever used, and has lots of amazingly slick features. You can download the fully-featured demo version for free, for Mac or PC.
I know - it looks like I'm affiliated with them, but I'm not. I did buy their software, and I rave about it to anyone who's remotely interested in astronomy or stargazing. You can even link it up to many motor-driven scopes and use it to explore. Clever, clever people!
Great Software
beeline Posted Feb 24, 2000
So, waddya think?
I bought the Deluxe Version, complete with about 19 million stars from the Hubble Catalogue. Useful? Who cares - it's amazing! 
Great Software
Jimi X Posted Feb 25, 2000
It's really cool! I've been playing with the demo for the past couple of days!! 
It's surprisingly good for how cheap the full version is.
- X
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beeline Posted Feb 28, 2000
Cool, huh!
There's an orbit editor so that you can add your own objects around any other objects, using the standard orbital elements, of 2-line NASA stuff, or whatever you like. It's pretty useful for entering big asteroids, satellites, Mir - you name it. You can also add a bitmap of the object's surface, which it will wrap around the sphere for you, so you can have an asteroid with your face on it! LOL!
Dad just bought a pretty gorgeous Meade 9-inch Matsutov Cassegrain, with motor-drive and stuff. We can link it up to the Mac and find pretty much anything. It... just works - perfectly! Of course, the zoom on the Mac is much better than the analogue scope magnification, and you can't easily take the scope to Saturn to look at its moons locally, but what you gonna do, eh?!
We've moved
Jimi X Posted Aug 2, 2000
My old observatory is closed!
Peta asked me to take over the h2g2 University Observatory
at http://www.h2g2.com/A338951
So, that's where you can now go for a sky update!
We've moved
Jimi X Posted Aug 10, 2000
LOL!
You wanna give me a location where you'll be for the list?
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