Untitled Document Copyright (c) 2004 Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews Chris Marriott's SkyMap Pro 10 Published by The Thompson Partnership, Devon, England By Ron Boe click to email author Abstract: A planetarium, sky mapping, and telescope controlling software program that runs under Windows. You get two CD-ROM disks, one contains the software, the other has pictures of objects. A small printed manual is included to help with installation with a small over view of the software. Over 200,000 objects come with it and more can be downloaded at www.skymap.com. It can also be purchased at the same site; pricing varies depending on your location. Minimum hardware requirements are not given. Service Packs are up to version 2. While I am not a strong user of astronomy planetarium software packages, I do use Planetarium for the Palm Pilot, I have also used, in a very limited way, EquinoX for the Apple Macintosh, Cosmos for OS/2 and Xephem for Linux. Experienced users of astronomy software will wonder why I passed over some features and gushed about others. Hopefully beginners will not be over whelmed. file:///Users/asaint/tmps2/skymap/skymap.htm (1 of 11)4/16/2004 3:11:02 AM Untitled Document Copyright (c) 2004 Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews One of the problems about doing a review like this is wondering what the reader will use the program for. Are you a list maker, checking off objects like a birder and his Life List? Do you do imaging and you need software to control your telescope? Do you look up at that sky, see too many stars and have no idea what is where and when and oh the enormity of it all! You need help! Depending on your favorite operating system there are some very nice choices available to the reader. In the Windows world Cartes du Ciel is probably the best value for the dollar and The Sky arguably the best known. As you have seen, I use neither (although I did download Cartes du Ciel for a quick seat of the pant feel of the program). CloudyNights.com has reviews of many of these, Neale Monks' Planetarium Programs article giving a nice run down of many of them. A must read. What follows are my impressions of the software, what I liked, didn't like, was impressed with and confused by. I hope you find it useful. I installed SkyMap Pro on a home built PC using an Epox motherboard, AMD Athlon 1.4GHz processor, 512MB of ram and a NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400 video card with 64MB of memory. Installation took about 18 minutes, which included both CD-ROMs. Performance has not been an issue with one exception I'll get into later. In the process of researching this article I found that service packs were available so the latest; version 2, was installed. Service packs and their availbility was not mentioned in the printed manual. file:///Users/asaint/tmps2/skymap/skymap.htm (2 of 11)4/16/2004 3:11:02 AM Untitled Document Copyright (c) 2004 Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews First impressions and what do you get? A standard plastic CD holder that you might expect a DVD to be in, two CD-ROMs and a small printed manual that looks like it was printed at home on really good paper from a decent colour ink jet printer, hand cut and stapled together. A bit cheesy in looks, but it's well written, has some screen shots that are too small to really read and it only boot straps you into the program. It's not a true manual. For that you have to use the ubiquitous Help supplied within the program. There is more help available on line from the home site and a yahoo group. So far not too impressive. Installation comes in three flavors: Complete at 540MB (truly complete, add another 490MB for the second CD containing the pictures), Standard at 190MB and Minimum at 17MB – a truly useless choice unless you are very hard up for hard drive space. Frankly, if you are that short on space you have no business buying more software until you upgrade your hard drive. On my machine this took about 17 minutes. No key or activation required. I'm feeling better about this package. Launching the program gave a few surprises. A tip box appears that you can disable if you wish. I advise not to until you are more familiar with the package: There is a lot in here. I'm constantly learning something from it. You are also greeted with a very pleasant looking sky. Stars are of different sizes and colours with the larger ones having defraction spikes. Annoying and cute at the same time. Not as professional looking as EquinoX, but it's easier to tell which stars are faint and distance vs. ones that should be bright and close. For someone like me that is easily confused by too many stars this is a boon. Unlike EquinoX, objects are visible below the horizon. I like that since I can see how close something is to popping up into view: e.g Omega Centauri. I'm starting to really like this program. First off you need to go to File:Preferences:Pictures so the program knows where the pictures are you loaded from the CD. Then off to the little World icon on the left hand boarder to set your location and time. Do a File:Save Defaults after this or you will be resetting your location every time you run SkyMap. I make these mistakes so you don't have to. While you are puttering around in Preferences take a quick look in Colour. You can change the default choices for the screen and the printer (no they are not the same, which will save you a bunch of ink when you do a print job). For printouts I wanted a bit more colour than the default choices. Note; you do not get difraction spikes on the printouts, nor do you get different coloured stars but their sizes do vary. I'm not a real power user of astronomy software. I need to know if Jupiter is going to be up and when on the night in question. Will this program do that? Of course! Under the World icon mentioned above you will find a Clock icon. Use this to set the time and date of your observing session. Locate Jupiter and see what your chances are. But what about Omega Centauri? Set your time and date as before, click on Search:Deep Sky Object by Popular Name (I can't remember it's NGC 5139 but if you could, by all means use search by catalog number) and choose it from the list provided. Please note the use of caps. There is another menu (when making a new list; mentioned later) that demands you type in the name exactly as it appears on the file:///Users/asaint/tmps2/skymap/skymap.htm (3 of 11)4/16/2004 3:11:02 AM Untitled Document Copyright (c) 2004 Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews list - I think is a bit of a stretch for a user to remember if it's spelled omega Centauri or Omega Centauri. Once you have it highlighted, choose GoTO and SkyMap Pro will go to your object and highlight it with a box. I didn't like the box though. While a workable enough idea, it just looks cluedgy and DOS like. This needs work and I don't have any good suggestions. Now the really cool thing happens. On the top menu bar, you have time lapse motion controls default time step is one hour. Then click on the righthand arrow and you can step the sky through time, waiting for Omega Centauri to come above the horizon. At the optimal height you click on the clock icon and note the time. Now you can plan to observe Omega Centauri when it is actually viewable. What if you won't see Omega Centauri until Bill Clinton gets reelected or you have other objects you would like to see: what do you do then? You create a target list or tour. Once you have created a list you have an area for comments; you can mark an item as observed so it won't come up again as you work through your list over time. You can even import tables off of the www.skymap.com web site and use them in part or whole for your tour. file:///Users/asaint/tmps2/skymap/skymap.htm (4 of 11)4/16/2004 3:11:02 AM Untitled Document Copyright (c) 2004 Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews These two screen shots show a list of databases I pulled off of SkyMap Pros' web site. Select the data bases you want to look through. From the second screen shot you see where you can select the objects of interest. Be careful, this list can become quite large. In the next two shots you see that I have selected all the databases, choose galaxies and clusters; coming up with almost 200,000 objects. Do you think this is a reasonable list to work with? I don't think so either; but who knew? There are variables to modify your list when using these databases. While I am pretty much your undiseplined take what comes sky tourist, this list idea is impressing me. Messier Marthons don't thrill me since you have to look at a lot of stuff that just does not twirl my prop.