Popular Science Review - Starry Night Enthusiast

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Software Review - Starry Night: Enthusiast - Space Software/Avanquest

For many, astronomy is more than just a matter of popping out and taking a peek at the stars - it's a serious hobby, and this is simply the best software we've seen to support that legion of amateur astronomers.

It's much more than a planetarium, though as we'll come back to, it's still a great way to find out what's what in the night sky. 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 SkyTheater, a DVD of mini-features covering around 2/3 of the excellent Atlas of the Sky DVD, and there's Starry Night itself. As well as the very powerful planetarium, with much more information than the beginner's versions (Enthusiast includes the NGC-IC catalogue of 13,000 deep-space objects and the Tully database with positions of 28,000 galaxies and 2.5 million stars), there's the excellent Sky Calendar that details all the upcoming notable events you will be able to see, and around 70 superb interactive explorations. I particularly liked the down-to-earth guidance on measuring angular separation of stars using your hands. Oh and there's a neat astronomical dictionary, plus a "fly around" spaceship feature like Deep Space Explorer.

Despite all the bells and whistles, Starry Night remains at its heart 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. 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 of excellent star charts to take outside and more.

The Enthusiast version of Starry Night isn't the ultimate. Those who have invested in a good telescope, or find themselves out there more than once a week might like to consider Starry Night: Pro version. This gives you much more flexibility on time base (100,000 years either way, to Enthusiast's 10,000 year span), five times as many stars, hi tech direct telescope control and more. There's also a Starry Night: Pro Plus version with even more data and images.

If you aren't such a serious astronomer, but find the night sky fascinating, consider the more basic but still excellent planetarium software, Astronomy Plus, or for just a little more the more information Complete Space and Astronomy Pack.

Inevitably Starry Night is going to be compared with Redshift. Each has benefits. Redshift wins hands down on price, and beats the cheaper versions of Starry Night on features. By the time you get to the Enthusiast version of Starry Night it has the edge on features, and the Pro version, with facilities like direct telescope control and much bigger date range is better still. Starry Night also has the edge on ease of use. But if you want power combined with value for money, Redshift is unbeatable.

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!

(NOTE - REVIEW IS VERSION 5)

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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