Chris Marriott's Skymap Pro 10 Published by the Thompson Partnership, Devon, England by Ron Boe Click to Email Author

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.

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. Now I can make Rons' Marthon (no threat of that name catching on) and see what I really want to look at. Messier Marthoners' can make up a list with the objects in the order they want to view them as the night progresses. This is good stuff.

In these two plates I have selected an object at random and brought up the information sheet on it.

You can glean from the size of the scroll bar and its' location there is a lot of information here. This was typical of any object I looked at. Are you impressed? I was.

Finally; for solar and lunar eclipse fans you can find the times for those events as seen in the next two screen shots.

For Solar Eclipses select Eclipse Map to get the screen shot seen below.

Want to take pictures of your targets? SkyMap Pro offers wireframe outlines for different cameras at different focal lengths. This list is not long, e.g. the ToUcam is not listed, so you will have edit the list to add your own camera. SkyMap Pro can also control your telescope so this wireframe is handy in centering your object or moving the scope during your tour. Try as I might I could not get the program to control my telescope; a Celestron NexStar 11GPS. The latest runtime version of ASCOM and related drivers were downloaded. Slewing is not supported for my scope, the software did not reflect where the scope was pointed (all done in the carefully controlled lab environment of my office, all EMF signals blocked by a metal roof) so I was quite disappointed. Time did not permit me to pursue this any further for this review. I'll append the review later if good things happen. My happiness is now tempered.

Want to play with field of views of different eye pieces in your scope? SkyMap has lists of eye pieces and telescopes to choose from. Yours' are not listed? Use the edit function to create it. This must be useful for some people but it gets the blank stare from me.

file:///Users/asaint/tmps2/skymap/skymap.htm (8 of 11)4/16/2004 3:11:02 AM Untitled Document Copyright (c) 2004 Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews SkyMap Pro can print what you see on the screen. You have control over the quantity of stars and the type of objects you see so this means you can create custom printouts or maps just for you. Remember the File: Prefrences:Colour option mentoned earlier? Unless you want bland all black print outs you will want to use this function to make your maps easier to read. Be careful about the amount of information on the screen because lables will overlap and the whole mess becomes unreadable in a hurry. Along with the lists feature, printing out maps is a feature I was quite taken with (notebly, a feature the SkyMap Pro folks take pains to point out too – with good reason). Using the on line databases to draw from the sky is your limit. A fairly crowded map took about a minute to be printed from my Epson C84 printer; about the same time for my HP- 1100. The ink jet quality was much better than the laserjet; and it didn't help that I had the option of using colour. A very nice colour ink jet printer is almost a must for this program.

As you can see from map I printed out below, they can be very detailed. Why an object like Omega Centauri is only shown as a circle with a cross instead of as a cluster confused me. But if you use the numeric key pad (one of those tips that was suggested to me), choosing 0 through 9, higher numbers showing more stars and zooming you in (if you then zoom out the screen quickly starts to look like a lizards skin with green lables over lapping – the effect is quite startling) the cluster starts to take shape.

file:///Users/asaint/tmps2/skymap/skymap.htm (9 of 11)4/16/2004 3:11:02 AM Untitled Document Copyright (c) 2004 Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews Got Linux and don't like to run Windows? This same set up running under SuSE 8.2 had SkyMap Pro running under WINE, the Windows emulation software package for Linux. This is the first software package I was able to run under WINE. After initial failures I never pushed it. SuSE 8.2 had so many functions on my computer running so well I tried it just for kicks. However; this was the only time SkyMap Pro seemed clunky and unresponsive. It's a cool trick, but I can't recommend it for full time use at the level of hardware I have.

Can't stand to touch a Windows machine or you need to run two computers like me, where your laptop is an Apple but you prefer to use SkyMap Pro vs. EquinoX (not out of the question folks)? If they are networked you can use a VNC product (I used Chicken of the VNC on the Apple, I'm not making up these names) and RealVNC on the Windows machine to remote control the Windows box from my laptop. All the CPU power to run SkyMap Pro is handled by the host computer. The client computer – the laptop in this case, just runs the window for the VNC client. Plenty of horse power left over for crunching video from the web cam. A word of caution, some keystrokes on the Mac caused the VNC program to crash but a reconnection was just seconds away, dropping me in right where I left off. This is a nice way to control your scope from a second computer in the comfort of your home.

While working on this review I often had SkyMap Pro, OpenOffice.org v1.0 and Otto's Print Screen (for grabbing and printing screen shots into the dreaded pdf file)running at the same time. At times OpenOffice or SkyMap would freeze up and I would have to log off or reboot to recover. Asking for a spell check, creating a list or other intensive function seemed to push my machine over the edge at times. I did not experience any difficulties while running either program alone.

The program appeared to be quite responsive; the only time I would notice a time lag: adding more objects to the screen, merging data sets or moving the screen when a large number of stars were displayed. Since having a large object set is really only useful when creating maps and not hopping around the sky I did not not see this as a problem. If you do, you better have some serious iron to run the program.

All in all I am fairly pleased with SkyMap Pro. The user interface is better than some; but I'm not impressed with any. When the menus look better in OpenOffice.org than your product you know some work could be done. Trying to find functions, for this green horn was trying at times; having to, gulp, resort to the Help function.

On the plus side, many functions were right up front and easy to use. Especially the animation buttons: That feature spun my prop!

Pros:

1. As advertised; great map making tool. 2. Great at generating lists which dovetails with the map feature. 3. Decent looking screen, a cut above Carte du Ciel, EquinoX & Xephem.

file:///Users/asaint/tmps2/skymap/skymap.htm (10 of 11)4/16/2004 3:11:02 AM Untitled Document Copyright (c) 2004 Cloudy Nights Telescope Reviews 4. Tons of data can be downloaded from the home web page.

Cons:

1. At press time (February 2004) it's $99.00, although a lite version is available for $35.99 plus shipping. There is some serious competition out there with very capable Cartes du Ceil free and The Sky starting at $49 and up to $249. 2. User interface seems privative and complicated. More experienced users may find this less troublesome. 3. The home website is not as easy to navigate for updates, drivers and data as it should be. Since so many programs are continually updated I think this is a fair ding, even though it's not part of the actual program. 4. ACOM runtime is needed to setup a ACOM telescope but you are not told of this until you are trying to set it up. No mention in the help section on telescopes either. But maybe I hold a grudge because my scope would not work. Only comes in a Windows version.

You may get the idea from the longer list of Cons. vs. Pros. that I did not like the program or think it comes up short. Far from it. There are things I would like to see changed, some are unrealistic, but on the whole it's a good product. Hopefully I have given you enough of an over view to help you decide if would be worth having for you. There are plenty of features I did not cover and choose not to include in the review since I wanted to write a review, not a users manual. For those still on the fence there is a demo version available for download.

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