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08/08/2004 |
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Starry Night Beginner Stars in your eyes? Kai Chandler gazes at a neat way to learn about astronomy.
System Requirements: Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000 or NT 4.0. What better time to learn about astronomy than these crisp clear Autumn evenings? If you’ve ever gazed at the planets and stars and wanted to know more then Starry Night Beginner from SPACE.com is well worth a look.
Installation is easy – first you need to confirm your location as the sky scenes are designed to show what you’ll see above and around you. Date and time is taken from your PC’s clock. Once loaded, Starry Night displays the view south. You can ‘grab’ the sky with your mouse and roll it around to the direction and elevation that you wish to view. If it’s night-time then you can see the planets and stars but during the day, you see trees with shadows from the sun. There’s good attention to detail – the shadows move around on the ground as the sun moves overhead. At night various objects can be seen. Menus
To identify an object you just move the cursor over it. This displays the name and the distance in Astronomical Units or light years for local or distant objects respectively. Alternatively, the labels can be displayed all the time. You can even display classical symbols representing the constellations. There are over 100,000 objects in the database. Solar objects A neat feature is a list of objects in our Solar System including moons of the planets. If you select one, the view moves until it centres on the object. You can then zoom in to see closeup photographs. You can run the display as a film show running at a variety of speeds. These can be saved as QuickTime .MOV files perhaps for use in a classroom environment. Watch out for the size of these files as they can become quite large. You can also export still images as .bmp files. Once saved, the stills and movies can be used by others without Starry Night. You can also print the star maps, perhaps to take outside to help with your star-gazing. If going forward or back in time is your thing then you can set the date anywhere between 200 BC and 3000 AD. Combined with Starry Night’s list of interesting celestial events between 1888 BC and 2959 AD that can be quite spooky! Each event has a simulation to view for example, the moon’s shadow over the Earth during a solar eclipse. The manual does point out, however, that the model’s accuracy over 2000 years can at times be inaccurate.
An online update feature allows you to check whether any updates exist. A 72 page manual introduces astronomy and shows how to get the best use from the program. Verdict All in all, this is an excellent indoor-planetarium introduction to astronomy with essential material for beginners but also with plenty of detail for them to grow into as their knowledge expands. Experienced astronomers should also consider Starry Night Backyard and Starry Night Pro which provide additional features such as a larger database of objects and the ability to change your viewpoint to any location up to 20,000 light years away. |
As the name suggests it’s not a heavy weight
reference for astronomy PhDs but rather an informative introduction
to identifying celestial objects. 
and
keyboard shortcuts allow you to select planets, artificial
satellites, asteroids, comets, stars and the milky way. This helps
draw attention to certain types of object. You can also suppress
less bright objects by setting the level of light pollution to that
of a large city. This makes it easier to identify the brightest
objects in the sky. 
Other
animated views include atlas mode, inner and outer solar systems,
Earth from Moon, Earthcentric (the pre-Copernicus concept,)
satellites, analemma which traces the sun’s position at 12 noon
every day and the solar neighbourhood. Beginners may need a little
more explanation about how to interpret these views than the program
gives but they would be useful in a classroom. 