Starry Night Deluxe versus Starry Night Pro
s
an owner of Starry Night Deluxe, you would probably like to know
what is new in Starry Night Pro. We have
designed Starry Night Pro to maintain all the functionality which you
enjoyed in the Deluxe version, while adding many new features which will
make Starry Night Pro an even more useful and enjoyable tool for finding
your way around the heavens.
As a courtesy to our customers, we offer upgrades to existing owners of Deluxe. Deluxe owners can order an upgrade online, or order by phone at 1-800-252-5417 (U.S. and Canada only). Please have your Starry Night Deluxe registration number handy when you order. If you order the upgrade, you will receive a complete printed Starry Night Pro User's Guide and the Starry Night Pro CD.
The new features in Starry Night Pro can be split into three major areas:
Please read on for a description of the new features in each of these areas.
Stars
Starry Night Pro includes the complete 100 000 star Hipparcos Catalog and the 1 000 000 star Tycho catalog (in addition to the 19 000 000 object Hubble Guide Star Catalog included in Starry Night Deluxe). These new catalogs have far better data:
- Accurate distances to stars. This is perhaps the coolest new feature about Starry Night Pro. Because we now know the distances to about 100 000 nearby stars, Starry Night will now allow you to view the night sky from anywhere within 20 000 light years of Earth! See the 3-dimensional structure of the solar neighbourhood or blast off Earth and head to Sirius (or any other nearby star) to see how the night sky & constellations look different from there.
- Excellent colour & luminosity information. This allows Starry
Night Pro to generate dynamic H-R (Hertzprung-Russell) diagrams for
any region of the sky. Just open the H-R window and Starry Night Pro
will plot an H-R diagram of those stars displayed onscreen. Options
allow you to plot B-V color, spectral type or temperature, and mark
the main sequence and white dwarf and supergiant regions. You can also
choose to graph only those stars within a certain distance range, allowing
you to produce an H-R diagram of a specific star cluster.
HR diagram of a Starry Night Pro sky view
- Proper motion. Starry Night Pro can display proper motion markers for stars on the screen or on printouts to indicate their speed and direction as they move across the celestial sphere. This proper motion is now also accounted for in the calculation of star positions, so you can view from far in the past or future to see how the nearest stars have moved relative to us.
- Variable & binary information. Starry Night Pro can now mark binary stars distinctively on the screen and on printouts, and can also mark variable stars in one of four categories, depending on how variable they are.
Deep Space Objects
In addition to the new star catalogs, Starry Night Pro includes the 60 000 object PGC catalog of galaxies (not in Deluxe) and better information for the NGC/IC catalog. For both these catalogs, you can:
- use the "Find" feature to locate these objects
- show correct angular size and shape of object
- set magnitude limits for display purposes
- automatically download a Digitized Sky Survey image of the object of the proper size and orientation. You can then "paste" this image in the program, and it will be there anytime you open the program from then on.
Comets, Satellites & Asteroids
Starry Night Deluxe allowed you to add your own comets, satellites & asteroids using the Orbit Editor, but devoted hobbyists found it quite time-consuming adding new objects one-by-one, and editing the elements of satellites as they changed over time. Starry Night Pro solves these problems. It ships with text files with data on 200 prominent asteroids, 75 comets, & 150 satellites, which are then automatically read into the program. SPACE.com maintains up-to-date versions of these files on our website, so you only need to download these files every so often to update the positions of these objects. As a bonus, any prominent new comets or spacecraft will be in the newer files. Users can still add special objects not in these files using the Orbit Editor, or by appending their own text documents of orbital elements to those that ship with the program.
Export Sky Data
With this new feature you can automatically export data on all objects displayed on screen in a convenient text format. Combine this with Starry Night Pro's custom controls to create datasets for almost anything you can think of. A few examples:
- All stars within 100 light years of Earth.
- All satellites above the horizon from your current location.
- All open clusters in the NGC/IC catalog.
Internet
Starry Night Pro adds two new Internet features:
- "What's Up Tonight?" Clicking this menu option in Starry Night Pro will transport you to a special page on our LiveSky website which is updated daily with tips and information on objects which are currently prominent in the night sky.
- Enhanced LiveSky support. Choosing the "LiveSky" option for a star in Starry Night Pro now offers you information about the star from the Aladin Previewer, the HEASARC astrobrowse service, and the online Hipparcos, Tycho or Guide Star Catalog (if applicable).
Starry Night Pro lets you make the sky look even better and more realistic than did Starry Night Deluxe. The new features include:
- Editable Horizons. You can now add hills and trees of any shape and size to mimic your own viewing location. Paste your own images of the house, backyard or family pets into the program, or create multiple horizon files for your favourite different observing locations!
- Image Editor. Starry Night Pro adds a powerful Image Editor feature which allows you to add images for any object or portion of the sky. Add images of NGC objects you have found on the Internet or replace some of the Messier images with shots from your own camera! Once you have added an image, it is there everytime you open Starry Night Pro, and will scale properly as you zoom in and out. The Image Editor also has tools to resize, rotate and slide your image to align it with background stars, so you know that you have it in exactly the correct place in the sky.
- Heads-Up Display (HUD). This feature will automatically bring up information about an object when you hover the cursor over it, saving you the trouble of switching tools in the Tool Palette. You can choose which information (i.e. name, constellation, magnitude, distance, etc.) you want the HUD to show.
- More realistic-looking stars. Choose from several levels of light pollution to add a glare and more closely resemble your own sky, or define a specific limiting magnitude. Use sliders to set the color levels, brightness and contrast of the stars.
- Night vision mode (graphics card-dependent). Take your copy of Starry Night Pro outdoors and run it in this red-screen mode to preserve your night vision! To make this feature work correctly, you need a video card which supports "downloadable gamma ramps". All Macintosh cards should work, but some older Windows cards will not (in addition, computers running on Windows NT do not support night vision). Check out a list of cards which do and do not support night vision. If your card is not on this list, you can contact support@starrynight.com to find out if night vision will work on your computer.
- Export as image feature. Now that you can make Starry Night look so great, you might want to save some colour screen images to print out or post on your website. Starry Night Pro allows you to save screen images in a variety of popular graphics formats, such as PICT and JPEG.
Starry Night Pro provides the ultimate level of customization. You can "tweak" almost every label, colour and setting in Starry Night to arrange your screen and star charts exactly the way you like. A few examples of new custom controls:
- A "centre" feature which allows you to type in co-ordinates in any co-ordinate system and have Starry Night Pro centre the sky on these co-ordinates.
- Customizable time steps. Define your own time units, for example, you can define a "Martian day" and step through time one Martian day at a time using the time controls to see how the planets change day-to-day as seen from the red planet.
- 3-Dimensional markers to celestial objects which indicate their alignment relative to the equatorial, ecliptic, or galactic planes.
- Custom field of view indicators. Create outlines for each of your eyepieces or your CCD camera and add to the screen or your printed star charts!
- NGC filter. Choose which types of NGC objects to display (galaxies, open clusters, nebulae, etc).