Popular Science Review - Starry Night: Complete Space & Astronomy Pack

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Software Review - Starry Night: Complete Space and Astronomy Pack V2 - Space Software/Avanquest

The night sky is a wonderful place, but it's easy enough to get lost - the Complete Space and Astronomy Pack contains everything you need to find your way around, and find out some amazing new facts.

In all there are five components to this remarkably affordable pack. There's a 192 page book (the Starry Night Companion) which isn't great, but you can't complain as it's effectively free. There's the Deep Space Explorer, a fun vehicle for travelling around the universe (click its name for a more detailed review), there's SkyTheater, a DVD of mini-features covering around 2/3 of the excellent Atlas of the Sky DVD, and there's Starry Night itself. This has the brilliant planetarium software featured in Astronomy, but with the real bonus of Starry Night Sky Guide, which gives you an effective multimedia exploration of different aspects of the night sky, from a close up view of the moon to an exploration of the Orion nebula.

Starry Night is an excellent planetarium program that brings up on your PC or Mac a view of the night sky that is simply brilliant. It's a clear, crisp, image, the controls are mostly intuitive and some of the extras are a delight. Constellations can be brought up in stick form, or (for the major ones) with a very effective graphic image. Click on a star or planet and you will get extra information. You can even travel to one. This may be a bit over the top for a star, but the way you travel out to Mars or Saturn is quite magical, and in the new Version 2 pack, you can even control this spaceflight with a joystick. The program shows you the view from home (or anywhere else), and monitors real time to show you the view now (but of course you can move to another date and time at will). The secondary features are good too. You can find something in space, print off star maps to take outside and more. But in the end you have to come back to what is an excellent planetarium with 1 million stars, 28,000 galaxies and 50 guided tours. The change to version 2 isn't great, but probably the most useful extra feature is a better find facility to quickly locate specific objects, and the extra status and info panes, giving secondary information as you cruise visually around the universe.

Astronomers who are real enthusiasts will want to go for one of the more powerful Starry Night versions, but for the 95 per cent of us, adult and child who just want to peep out at the stars occasionally and know what we're seeing, and to find out more about space, this is excellent.

According to the blurb the software runs on PCs and Macs - we have only tested it on PCs.

The DVD is only available in region 1/NTSC format. This will work with most PCs with DVD players, and on multi-region and NTSC supporting DVD players (including more recent Playstation 2s), but will not work on quite a lot of European (PAL) DVD players. Check the compatibility of your player!

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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