SkyMap Pro 11

SkyMap Pro is a powerful and flexible astronomical companion for your computer, giving you easy access to information which was only available to a select group of professional astronomers a few short years ago. SkyMap combines sophisticated planetarium and map-drawing capabilities with the ability to easily display detailed information on many millions of different objects - stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, and so on.

At its most basic level SkyMap can act as a simple planetarium, showing you the appearance of the sky, as seen from anywhere on Earth, for any date between 4000 BC and 8000 AD. With a click of the mouse, you can select exactly which features to display - constellation lines, names and boundaries, planets, comets, "deep sky objects", various scale lines and coordinate grids, and much more. You can scroll the map around to show any part of the sky, easily change your geographical location, alter the time and date, and so on. Want to see the appearance of the night sky from Egypt at the time the pyramids were built? A few clicks of the mouse, and it's right there in front of you.

Of rather more practical use to modern astronomers is SkyMap's ability to act as a sophisticated mapping tool; far more flexible and containing hugely more information than the best printed star atlas. You can zoom in to a practically unlimited extent, displaying stars as faint as magnitude 16, and deep sky objects from dozens of different catalogs. Sophisticated "filtering" capabilities allow you to select exactly which objects to display - for example, you might choose to display only globular clusters from the NGC catalog which are brighter than magnitude 10, and larger than 5 arc minutes in diameter. Once you have a map just the way you want it, it can be printed as a high-quality chart on any printer supported by Windows. Full support is provided for printing in both black and white and in colour.

SkyMap's real power comes from the fact that a vast wealth of information lies behind the symbols you see on the map. Click on any object on a map and SkyMap can display all the information available for that object from many different catalogs. The information can be copied to the Windows clipboard, from where it can easily be incorporated into a word processor, or other Windows application. The quantity of information available is huge - for a bright star, for example, it can occupy half a dozen sheets of paper when printed in a small font!

With all those objects available, it's obviously vitally important to be able to quickly and easily locate those objects which interest you, and SkyMap offers powerful search facilities to make that task very simple. The search engine allows you to either draw a map showing the location of an object, or simply to display all the information available about the object.

Although SkyMap is supplied with a large number of different data catalogs, you are not limited to those supplied with the program. An easy-to-use data preparation tool makes it easy to add virtually any data catalog to SkyMap and, once added, those "external" catalogs are fully integrated into the program, allowing the objects they contain to be displayed on a map and searched, exactly as can be done with the "built-in" catalogs. This is an extremely powerful facility for astronomers with specialist interests who wish to use some of the more "obscure" data catalogs which are available.

Another facility offered by SkyMap is the ability to associate images with objects in the SkyMap database. Click on any object on a map and SkyMap will search for a picture of that object, giving the option to display it if found. SkyMap can be used with almost any picture viewing program, and can support any image format which that viewer can handle. SkyMap is supplied with a large collection of astronomical pictures, generously contributed by amateur astronomers, and it's very easy to add your own pictures too. SkyMap isn't supplied with a picture viewer - you can either use the simple viewers supplied with Windows, or more "sophisticated" picture viewing programs available from many third parties.

There are a number of planetarium programs available today. Unlike some of these, SkyMap makes no claims of blindingly fast calculation speeds. Instead, what SkyMap concentrates on is accuracy, always making use of the most up-to-date data and the most accurate calculation methods available. This accuracy makes SkyMap equally suited for both the novice astronomer who just wants to know "what's that bright object up there?" and the serious amateur or professional astronomer who wants a detailed "finder chart" for a faint galaxy. SkyMap carries out its calculations in as efficient as manner as possible, but it never compromises accuracy for the sake of speed. An increase in speed can always be achieved by using a faster computer!

Amongst the basic facilities of SkyMap Pro are the following:

• Easily move the map around the sky, zoom in and out, and rotate the map with a single key press or click of the mouse button.
  
• Display more than 15 million stars as faint as magnitude 15. The 2.5 million brightest stars are displayed with (approximately) their true colours.
  
• Display more than 200,000 deep sky objects - star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, and so on. Virtually every object which can be observed in a typical amateur telescope (and many that can't be!) are included in SkyMap Pro's extensive databases.
  
• Display the positions of the Sun, Moon, and major planets. Positions have an accuracy of a small fraction of an arc second.
  
• Display the names, official boundary lines, and "stick figures" of all 88 constellations.
  
• Display the positions of all known asteroids and comets. Updated asteroid and comet data can be downloaded free of charge from this web site, or automatically updated from the internet from within the program.
  
• Display a wide range of different coordinate grids and scale lines showing altitude/azimuth, RA/dec, ecliptic and galactic coordinates.
  
• Display pictures of more than 15,000 astronomical objects from the picture collection supplied with SkyMap Pro. If the computer is connected to the Internet, a picture of any object can automatically be downloaded and displayed, or you can add your own photographs and CCD images to create your own custom picture library.
  
• Add your own "annotations" to a map, including text labels, lines or arrows, eyepiece field of view circles, camera and CCD field of view rectangles.
  
• Display a photographic "background images" on the star chart. This can either be read from the RealSky® CD-ROMs (not supplied), or automatically downloaded from the Internet.
  
• Print high-quality star charts on any printer supported by Windows.

SkyMap Pro has many powerful features primarily targeted at the more "advanced" user. These include:

• A powerful search facility allows any of the millions of objects in SkyMap Pro's databases to be easily located.
  
• Detailed information can be displayed about any object known to SkyMap Pro, either by clicking the object on the map with the mouse, or locating it using the search facility. Complete information from many different professional data catalogs is available; this can be copied to the Windows clipboard from where it can be pasted into any other application, such as a word processor. You can add your own notes to the supplied information for any object.
  
• A large library of telescope and eyepiece data is supplied. "Field of view" circles showing any combination of eyepiece and telescope can be drawn on the map - ideal for finder charts intended for "star hopping".
  
• The path of any moving object such as a planet, asteroid, or comet can be drawn on the map as a line labelled with the date and magnitude at specified intervals - ideal for comet or asteroid finder charts.
  
• A tabular "ephemeris" can be created for any planet, comet, or asteroid. Choose any (or all!) of more than 30 different items of information to display. This allows you, for example, to display a table showing the times of sunrise and sunset every day for a year, or to show the coordinates and magnitude of a comet for a period of several weeks.
  
• Accurate positions of major planetary satellites can be displayed on the map. The four "Galilean" satellites of Jupiter, the eight largest satellites of Saturn, and the five largest satellites of Uranus are shown. For Jupiter, the planet's belts and zones, the position of the "Great Red Spot", and and transits, shadow transits, occultations, and eclipses of the Galilean satellites are all accurately depicted.
  
• Asteroid positions can optionally be computed using either the Lowell ASTORB database or the Minor Planet Center's MPCORB orbit database, both of which can be downloaded free of charge from the Internet. Both databases are updated daily and contain the latest orbital elements for all known asteroids.

more info @http://www.skymap.com/smp_info.htm


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