sky charts
Who said you needed to buy an expensive Cd-rom to have a quality sky atlas ?
Sky Charts (a.k.a. Cartes du Ciel) computes and prints customized charts of the heavens, making use of the data in 16 catalogs of stars and nebulae. In addition the position of planets, asteroids and comets are shown.
The purpose of this program is to prepare different sky maps for a particular observation. A large number of parameters help you to choose specifically or automatically which catalogs to use, the colour and the dimension of stars and nebulae, the representation of planets, the display of labels and coordinate grids, the superposition of pictures, the condition of visibility and more. All these features make this celestial atlas more complete than a conventional planetarium.
Main features offered include:
- about 30 catalogues of stars, star clusters, nebulae and galaxies;
- ability to request portions of star catalogues online so as to plot charts until mag. 20;
- facility of self-updating online, from different sources, the comet and asteroid elements databases;
- option to request from SkyView - Digital Sky Survey, and similar sources, real sky images of the region drawn on the chart - with the ability of superimposing and easily editing, filtering and chromatically juggling them;
- DDE interface allowing the joint use with VAROBS - another freeware by Patrick Chevalley, consecrated to variable stars (in V3 this was included in the main program and there is no need for a separate download);
- Interfaces with Virtual Moon Atlas so as to get location charts for the Moon;
- Additional support of Real Sky and USNO Cds;
- Telescope control under ASCOM, INDI and a few specific drivers;
- Production of ephemeris tables;
- Eclipse charts;
- Satellite pass prediction and plotting;
- Get your location coordinates from a huge database on the Web.
