Dive into the universe with new Starry Night Pro 7!
Stunningly realistic, Starry Night Pro immerses you in the wonders of the universe. A new layer of over 100 interactive, multimedia tours reveal the fascinating science and history of stars, providing a deeper understanding of the universe. An elegant, easy-to use interface with Universal Search lets you quickly tap into a new and improved suite of features.
All the tools you need: events finder, computerized telescope control, observation planner, customizable equipment list, built-in ephemeris generator, printable 180-degree star charts and more are at your fingertips. Powerful and fast, this program with access to 500 million stars and 1 million galaxies is a feast for your senses and fuel for your imagination.
Some features of Starry Night Pro 7:
- New user interface and Universal Search: Starry Night makes it easy to locate the position of the Sun, and over 5 million other space objects—including all the planets and their moons, comets, asteroids, satellites, Messier objects, the complete NGC-IC catalog, and more. If you are interested in a specific target such as a planet, a constellation, or a bright new comet, all you have to do is type its name into the Universal Search field. Moreover, you can also use Universal Search to find different program features & options, Starry Night files, SkyGuide references, special celestial events, and much more. The all new Pro 7 user interface has been carefully re-designed to optimize your software experience. The dynamic UI allows faster access to all your files, features & databases, while also providing the ability to easily hide-away the menu system for a deeply rich, and transparent, planetarium experience.
- Skyguide: Take an interactive Tour: Over one hundred interactive multimedia tours await you in the SkyGuide pane. These in-depth experiences reveal the fascinating science and history of the solar system, the stars, the galaxies, the beginning of time, and the fate of the universe. As you and SkyGuide explore together, you will learn tips for navigating the sky, fun facts of the solar system, seasonal tours of the sky, and much, much more. Throughout this multimedia matrix you’ll discover images and movies to enhance the experience.
- Observation List: The Observation List is a tool that you can use to help create a list of astronomical objects that you wish to observe. You can make a list of targets for a particular night or create a list of targets that you want to observe over a period of time. For example, you can create a list of open clusters that are visible tonight in your 8-inch telescope from your backyard between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. Or you may want to observe all galaxies brighter than 9th magnitude over the course of a year. On any given night, Starry Night will let you know what galaxies are visible. Starry Night will even let you know what galaxies you have already observed and which ones you still need to hunt down.
- Space Missions: Starry Night Pro 7 lets you join in with both manned and unmanned space missions. Hover above Earth in the International Space Station. Launch the two Voyager spacecraft missions to explore and photograph the gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Hitch a ride with the Cassini and Huygens project to study Saturn and land on its moon, Titan! Join the Galileo spacecraft as it the observes a comet colliding with Jupiter. Starry Night Pro 7 includes new and updating space missions, with 30 new detailed and accurate 3D models of spacecraft and their trajectories.
- View the sky from anywhere: Starry Night can show you the sky from your own backyard or from any other location on Earth. But that’s only the beginning. You can lift off and travel to many thousands of places within our galaxy, or instantly jump to any one of them. Visit hard-to-reach spots like the North Pole. Or cruise the solar system on the lookout for fascinating vantage points. It’s easy to change your location. Start by selecting from a list of over 8000 real places in the universe. If your chosen spot is not on the list, you can always add a new one. And, just as you changed your viewing location on Earth, you can also view the cosmos from anywhere in space! Go to the Moon and witness a total eclipse from one of the Apollo landing sites. Watch the sunset from the surface of Mars or one of the newly discovered exoplanets. Or even ride a comet as it makes its long trek around the Sun. You are limited only by your curiosity!
- Travel in time: See how the sky will look tonight or tomorrow, or even far into the past or future. Perhaps that’s what the locals were trying to do at Stonehenge. You can also journey thousands of years into the future and sneak a peak at solar eclipses, lunar eclipses, and other celestial events long before they happen. Starry Night not only places you somewhere in time, it also lets you control the flow of events. You can speed up the rotation of the Earth, change the pace of planetary motion through the constellations, or rewind history and watch a solar eclipse as often as you’d like, perhaps changing your viewpoint a little each time. With Starry Night, you are not stuck in the here and now. Of course, you can also journey thousands of years into the future and sneak a peak at solar eclipses, lunar eclipses, and other celestial events long before they happen.
- Ephemeris Generator: You’ll always know where and when to look with Starry Night’s built-in ephemeris generator. It’s a handy observational aid that creates a table of positional data for any object over the time span and at the interval you specify. You can then export the generated values to a text file and print it out. Ephemeris values are handy for knowing where an object will be in the sky at a particular time. If you are using manual or digital setting circles, for instance, you can dial in the generated positional data to locate an object quickly. For example, if you are tracking the path of a fast-moving asteroid as it makes its closest approach to Earth, your ephemeris table will let you know exactly where the asteroid will be during the time period you’ll be observing it.
- Add your own DeepSky images: Today, Starry Night can show you millions of stars, but even this is only a tiny fraction of the stars and objects that can be seen through our powerful modern telescopes. On the Internet, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) hosts a very large database, called the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS). This survey contains large, high-resolution pictures of the entire night sky. The database is so large that it is distributed on a few hundred CD-ROMs, but Starry Night Pro 7 makes it easy to download, import and look at the thousands of galaxies, nebulae, and other astronomical phenomena it contains.
- Automatic updates: We know that both the universe and our understanding of it will change in the future. New moons will be discovered. Bright new comets will streak around the Sun (and many won’t survive). New satellites will be launched into orbit. New planets will be found around other stars. Life may even be discovered somewhere beyond Earth. And to ensure that you always have the most current view, Starry Night can automatically update its vast library of information over the Internet. But since the databases of comets, asteroids, and satellites can change more frequently than other databases, Starry Night also lets you manually download the latest versions.
- Equipment List: All your observing equipment, such as telescopes, binoculars, eyepieces, barlows, focal reducers, CCDs, and other accessories—all your stuff can be stored in Starry Night’s equipment list. Starry Night can then use this information to calculate your onscreen field-of-view indicator. In other words, Starry Night automatically creates outlines that correspond to the field of view of your various equipment combinations, such as a particular telescope and eyepiece. These outlines help you know how much of the sky you are seeing when looking through your telescope, binoculars, or CCD camera. You can also create Telrad, Rigel, and finderscope outlines to help you hop around the sky from star to star.
- Telescope Control: If you have an automated GoTo-telescope you can probably use Starry Night Pro 7 to control it. On Windows, Starry Night Pro 7 supports all telescopes that are supported by Ascom. The Ascom Platform can be downloaded here: ascom-standards.org
What's new in the Starry Night Pro Version 7?
- Exoplanets modelled as 3D bodies with proper location, size, orbit and planetary textures.
- New simple, fast & streamlined user-optimized interface, including a new "Universal Search" for objects, Starry Night files, SkyGuide references, options, events, and more.
- Every star now accurately rendered as a 3D body with classification-appropriate color, texture and relative radii.
- Accurate outlines and positional data for 1400 dark, emission, planetary and reflection nebulae.
- Hertzsprung-Russell diagram tells us about a star’s age and its mass. Easily identify stellar oddballs, such as white dwarfs, supergiants, and extremely massive main sequence stars.
- Exclusive Extragalactic 3D Database - 100,000 galaxies - over 1 billion lights years of space.
- Updated Surface Maps of Planets and Moons.
- Restyled SkyGuide with updated tours and interactive multimedia.
- New and updating space missions with 30 new detailed and accurate 3D models of spacecraft and their trajectories.
- Updated Messier catalog with new high resolution images for star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies.
Requirements: Windows 8/7/Vista or Macintosh OS X 10.7 or higher. 1GHz or higher processor, 1 GB RAM and 4 GB of hard disk space. 128 MB OpenGL 1.4 capable graphics card.
MaximDL Plugin: The Plus-Version of Starry Night Pro 7 comes with a plugin for MaximDL (version 4.0.7 and higher)
For years, the software program MaxIm DL has been the premiere package for astronomical CCD imaging and image processing. Now you can target and capture an image in Starry Night Pro Plus with a plug-in to MaxIm DL. This innovative integration lets you find your target, take and process images with MaxIm DL and then import these pictures back into Starry Night Pro Plus. Take your passion for the night sky to new heights with the ability to create your own stunning astrophotography. MaxIm DL Advanced CCD Imaging Software is available only for windows and is sold separately.
