Starry Night
Starry Night is a suite of commercially available astronomy software from Imaginova Corp. for amateur astronomers, especially the various planetarium programs. It shows the sky above the earth from any location, as well as from other celestial bodies of the solar system. More extensive products in the series of planetarium programs also offer the possibility of simulating and viewing the sky from any point in the local group .
The software offers the possibility to explore from more than 200,000 in the simple execution of the program up to over 2.5 million stars with additional information in the most extensive version of the series and to be displayed as an artificial sky with photo-realistic images. In addition, deep sky objects such as galaxies are also implemented photo-realistically and round off the view of the sky. One of the many extras is the many different small celestial bodies in our solar system such as asteroids or comets , which are all simulated as realistically as possible.
The simulation is possible both in real time and in time lapse in both directions of the time axis. The ability to skip to any date makes it possible to see the sky at the time of Christ's birth or get a glimpse of the solar system from Comet Hale-Bopp .
With an additional plug-in , which is already included in more extensive versions, telescopes equipped with a compatible motor can be controlled and aligned with points selected in the software and viewed with the naked eye.