Starry Night (planetarium software)
Starry Night is a desktop planetarium and a commercial planetarium software package, available for macOS and Microsoft Windows. Starry Night focuses heavily on providing attractive, realistic imagery, although versions have also increasingly targeted the amateur astronomy community with features like observation planning, telescope control, and multiple-panel printing. In 2010 Starry Night began customizing its software for use in Elementary, Middle and High Schools and in Colleges and Universities worldwide.
| Developer(s) | Simulation Curriculum Corp. |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 7.5.6
/ 7 April 2017 |
| Operating system | macOS, Microsoft Windows |
| Type | Planetarium |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www |
Initially developed in Toronto, Canada, Starry Night is now owned and developed by Simulation Curriculum Corp., a Minneapolis-based publisher of educational curriculum, software and iOS/Android apps under their brand SkySafari
Features
The following is a list of key features:
- Display a realistic night sky, including stars from the USNO A2 catalogue, the Hipparcos Catalogue, the Tycho-2 Catalogue, and the Tully catalogue of galaxies;
- View the night sky from any location on Earth or any position in the solar system, the nearby Milky Way, or the Local Group of galaxies;
- Display any date and time for thousands of years in the past and future;
- Animate time forwards or backwards at any rate;
- Create observing plans;
- Calculate ephemerides of Solar System objects;
- Display of current imagery from solar and Earth-observing satellites;
- Generate a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of the displayed stars;
- Control most popular GOTO telescopes through a serial interface cable;
- Display the sky using an all-sky photographic mosaic created from CCD imagery.
Updates
Updates are pushed out to users regularly via in-application code.