Starry Night (planetarium software)

Starry Night is a commercial planetarium software package, available for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Starry Night focuses heavily on providing attractive, realistic imagery, although recent versions have also increasingly targeted the amateur astronomy community with features like observation planning, telescope control, and multiple-panel printing.

Initially developed by Sienna Software, Starry Night is now owned and developed by Simulation Curriculum Corp., a Minneapolis-based publisher of educational curriculum and software.

Features

The following is a list of key features:

• Display a realistic night sky, including stars from the USNO A2 catalogue, the Hipparcos Catalogue, the Tycho-2 Catalogue, and the Tully catalogue of galaxies;
• View the night sky from any location on Earth or any position in the solar system, the nearby Milky Way, or the Local Group of galaxies;
• Display any date and time for thousands of years in the past and future;
• Animate time forwards or backwards at any rate;
• Create observing plans;
• Calculate ephemerides of solar system objects;
• Display of current imagery from solar and Earth-observing satellites;
• Generate a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of the displayed stars;
• Control most popular GOTO telescopes through a serial interface cable;
• Display the sky using an all-sky photographic mosaic created from CCD imagery.

Updates

Updates are pushed out to users regularly via in-application code.

See also

• Cartes du Ciel
• Celestia
• Digital Universe Atlas
• Google Sky
• Hallo Northern Sky
• KStars
• RedShift
• Stellarium
• TheSky
• WinStars
• WorldWide Telescope
• XEphem

External links

• Official website
• Review of Starry Night Pro 5