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I am currently taking an astronomy class at college and our text came with a copy of Starry Night Enthusiast software. The installer only works for Windows/Mac, but the software is java/opengl. Maybe one of these days I could try to load it under Linux. Anyway, it is rather neat software. I am just starting to explore it and some of the views it produces are incredible. Here is the website: http://www.starrynight.com/

There are many great ways to enjoy astronomy. The easiest and cheapest is to get binoculars (50mm or more) and a star chart. In dark skies, you can see some really cool things with just those, and trying to find the constellations and nebula/globular clusters is fun and gives you a feeling of accomplishment. Check out Stellarium (free and open-source) or Starry Night to get a view of the sky and find some things to look at. You can also explore the sky now in Google Earth.

For just viewing, I'd recommend a Dobsonian telescope. They are the cheapest and lightest. The Orion Skyquests I linked to are great. It took me maybe 45-60 minutes to get it put together for the first time, and it's really easy to take around if you get the bag. You can carry the bag in one hand and the base in the other with the handle. The IntelliScope computer worked great, it only takes a couple minutes to get it going and have it point you to the right place in the sky. Basically you find a few bright objects that you know, point the telescope to center on them, and push a button on the controller. Then you type the identifier for something you want to see onto the controller and it gives you a reading of how far to move (around and up/down). You just move the telescope until both numbers reach 0 and the object is centered for you. Grab a wide-field lens to see faint objects like nebula, galaxies and globular clusters. narrow-field lenses make an object seem larger, but they actually make nebula and galaxies look dimmer.

However, Dobsonians are not good for astrophotography. They rely on you to move them, so there's no tracking. You'd be surprised how fast the sky moves across your field of view. At high magnification you can actually see Saturn moving across your field of view for instance. To get good photographs, you need to have longer exposures, which means your telescope needs to be able to move itself. For a good Schmidt-Cassegrain that can track itself you are looking at more like $2,000... Those are usually heavier as well, my 10" weighs about 80 lbs.

Whatever you do, realize that light-gathering ability goes up by the square of the mirror dimensions (roughly). So if you get a telescope with an 8" mirror, that is about 50 square inches of light-gathering ability. If you move up to a 10" mirror you get an area of 78.5 square inches. You could use a 19 second exposure instead of a 30 second exposure if you're doing astrophotography.

Stellarium is nice, however, I believe Starry Night is even more powerful. It's proprietary software though, if it matters to you, but I believe much more powerful, and pretty much the best on the market right now.

Cool, this coincides perfectly with my purchase of Starry Night a few days ago. I never knew much about astronomy, but I've learned tons in the last few days of playing with it, and I totally understand, technically, what this guy did re: Hipparchus, whereas I'm sure I wouldn't have really understood it just last week. (i.e., how the ecliptic precesses relative to the celestial equator.)

Starry Night is definitely the coolest program I've purchased in a long time. (I swear I'm not a shill!) Great for planning photo shoots, too.

Yeah, but they should at last mention that a kernel panic is a common risk.
At any rate, first time ever and even for a kernel panic Apple's got a classy screen :-)

I used 'starry night' for OS9 and I saw that they now have a OS X version out, has anybody tried it?

I've been playing around with this prog, it has quite a big 3d map in it.

I'm in the same boat as you but slightly further along. I'd always been bleating to my wife about wanting to get into Astronomy so she went out and got me a telescope as a gift. It's only a 60mm Refractor but it does have a decent equatorial mount and eyepieces although I can always buy others since it came with the standard size.

After checking out all the abvious ones like the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn (now *there's* a buzz) and generally impressing my family I started doing a bit more reading. As pointed out earlier it's no good looking at stuff close-up if you don't know a little more about the big picture. Kind of a "forest for the trees" thing but it's a pretty damn big forest :). So I got a planisphere and a start chart and sat out and learned where stuff was generally and how to find it. Stuff like using Orion to find Procyon and Canopus or using other markers as guides. Just sitting out under the stars and seeing how the sky fits together is as fun as seeing Saturn for the first time.

Don't forget you can also look for other things like satellites and Iridium flares which I've just learnt about.

I've having a look at some of the maths as well. Like how to calculate sunrise/sunset times etc. It's fascinating to see how it all fits together and it's damn cool to plug in a few values and calculate sunset time and then 'Hey presto!' the sun sets at that time. Maths on a real and big scale.

There's oodles of software. Some of the more esoteric stuff like Iridium flares uses some wacky software but some of the general software is great. I can't attest to the X software but an excellent Windows (/me ducks) product is Starry Night from http://www.starrynight.com/. The backyard version has some cool features and isn't so light that you'll outgrow is quickly.

Anyway, have a blast and may your skies always be clear.

A co-worker of mine showed be this software which I think does a lot of what you describe. I was impressed with it. It costs money, but there is a trail version on that site.

There's a nice program called Starry Night it lets you pick any point in time and view the cosmos. You can also go to any planet and view what the stars look like from there. Of course it's only for windows or mac and it costs money. It's still very cool though.

It may be commercial, but a program, convieniently named "Starry Night" is available from starrynight.com. There is even a trial download for 15 days.


--Xandu