Zookland Home Zookland Astro Section  My Light Bucket      Pic Gallery          Equipment Recommendations Software Recommendations When All You Have Is Up (Video 3.8MB) Astronomy Resources Details About the Links Below Telescope Magnafication and Field of View Calculator Water Vapor Maps Nice Moon Phase Calendar! Fort Wayne Astronomical Society (Indiana) weather.com for your zip code All the Astrophotography on this site was taken with a Canon SD1100IS! (EOS Section coming soon!)		I use CyberSky planetarium software as a planning tool for astronomy outings.  I sampled several different packages and settled on CyberSky for a couple of reasons.  The price ($32.95) is reasonable and I like the time controls. They are intuitive and convenient to use and allow me to know in advance what will be where in the sky when.  Most of the other features I like are fairly common in planetarium software.  You can turn various types of celestial objects on and off, like stars, planets, comets, asteroids, deep space objects and the milky way, as well as constellation lines and the names of various objects. There is also a magnatude limit setting, and this is often best used in conjunction with turning the stars off.  When you set the magnatude limit (on the View menu) to a higher number (higher magnatude = dimmer object) the display adjusts the size of the stars based on their magnatude, making brighter stars bigger.  If I am looking at a wide angle view and set the magnatude limit to the maximum for my 10" telescope (14.5), there are suddenly more bright colored dots in the sky than there are empty spaces, making the display very difficult to look at.  If you turn the stars off and deep space objects on, then setting the magnatude to 14.5 shows a ton of galaxies and nebulae that would not otherwise be displayed. One criticism I had was that comets did not seem to respond to the magnatude limit.  When you pause your mouse pointer over an object in the sky, information, including the magnatude, pops up in a tool tip beside the mouse pointer.  When you turn the comets on, the program will display comets as dim as magnatude 23, well beyond the capacity of any backyard telescope.  (A 16 inch scope tops out at magnatude 15.5 or 15.9.)  As it turns out, this feature is configurable from the Objects menu.  I got a quick response to an email I sent to the maker of the software to ask about this. Some goto telescopes I looked at come with planetarium software, so if you are going that way, you may not need this. BTW...I used screen shots from cyberSky in my "When All You Have Is Up" video, and in the ISS sighting charts.		^That's not a button, because I don't want my listing to be so easy for the spambots to find. You'll have to DIY. Our Parent Company Hat Boss Dot Com, LLC Free Wallpaper Tiles at PictureSeeds.com. Free Wallpaper Tiles at MartianWallpaper.com Free Fullscreen Windows .bmp wallpapers at FreePaperSite.com