dporter@leland.Stanford.EDU (David Porter) (04/21/91)
I have recently developed a straight-forward, user-friendly planetarium program for IBM compatibles. Basically, given any location, date, and time, SkyWatch produces an accurate and attractive screen display representing the night sky, as it would appear looking in any given direction. The data files include 850 of the brighter naked eye stars, all the constellations, the five naked eye planets, and about 30 of the more prominent Messier objects. Simple commands allow the user to zoom in and out on any region of the sky, fade out the dimmer stars to simulate less-than-ideal viewing conditions, display names of stars and constellations, test his/her knowledge of star names, "rotate" the sky on the screen in real or accelerated time, add or remove reference marks such as right-ascension and declination grid lines, zenith, and ecliptic, and print the display to a dot-matrix printer. Stars are displayed according to actual visual magnitude, and may optionally be displayed in representative colors on a color monitor. I'm an amateur myself, and SkyWatch doesn't pretend to be a scientific tool, but it is highly accurate, it looks good on the screen, and it's a great way-- finally--to learn all of those slightly more obscure constellations! Please reply to dporter@leland.stanford.edu for more info. Thanks! Dave Porter