Sunday, June 02, 2013
What this Country Needs is a good Five-cent Cigar…
And a simple
and inexpensive computer planetarium that’s as useful for advanced amateurs as a
“quick-look” program as it is for novices as an all-round astronomy
application. Two decades ago, in those simpler times of the early 1990s, that bill
was filled by a program I’ve written about a time or two before, muchachos, Skyglobe.
Skyglobe, and, particularly its most realized
version, v3.6, introduced many of us old-timers to PC-centric amateur astronomy.
Even in them days, it wasn’t the most powerful or feature-laden planetarium
around. That was OK. It didn’t have thousands of objects, but it had enough to
keep a novice occupied, and it wasn’t overly pretty, but was legible and was
great at showing what the sky was like right
now. And man was it fast.
SkyGlobe was a DOS program (the PC operating
system that came before Winders and OSX, younguns), and while its author, Mark Haney,
tried to transition it to Windows 3.1, producing a semi-working version for the
new O/S, the Windows Skyglobe was
never fully developed. Apparently, Mr. Haney lost interest before he was
completely done. Didn’t matter; many of us continued using the DOS Skyglobe for years and years, till the
coming of Windows 7 made it difficult—if not impossible—to run. When that
happened, amateurs like me who still admire the simple and elegant began asking
“What now?”
Since I am
(ahem) well past the novice stage in amateur astronomy and have more astro-ware
on my hard drive than humans should be allowed to have, I can use any number of
“advanced” programs for quick checks on the sky. Some, like TheSky 6, are admittedly purty quick to
load up on modern machines. Still, when something like TheSky 6 Professional is running, I tend to get distracted by all
them buttons and widgets. It and Starry
Night Pro Plus and their cousins are just overkill; they are considerably more complex than I need or want to
get a reading on the current layout of the sky.
I don’t want
to hunt among toolbars filled to bursting with tiny icons to find the time
advance button. I want big and obvious.
I don’t want to have to remember which mouse button to hold down to drag the
sky or the key combo I need to use with that. I just want to drag. Even better,
I want to push one button to show me the western sky where I know Jupiter is.
“Simple” is now
a scarce commodity in pay-for-play astronomy software. Today’s astro-soft authors seem to have decided the
way to make their programs better is
to make them bigger, with more stars,
more objects, more options, more everything—to include more bucks for the
admission price. This even affects the smart phone astronomy market, where the
software is quickly heading for the “entire PGC” hills.
There are
some outstanding freeware planetariums for PCs and Macs, including what is
probably the most popular free software of all time for serious amateurs, Cartes du Ciel. Unfortunately, Cartes,
good as it is, is serious software, and had never been overly simple to use. Even
a couple of the more middle-of-the road freeware softs when it comes to
complexity, Hallo Northern Sky and Winstars, have gone down the MILLIONS
AND MILLIONS path. But none of that mattered to me, not as long as I could run
good, ol’ Skyglobe.
Set the
controls of the WABAC machine to just a smidge upriver on the time stream, four
or five years ago. Unk being the cheap sort he is, Chaos Manor South’s kitchen
workstation where I do most of my work was an eMachines desktop at the time.
Don’t laugh. It was a good PC, running Windows XP rather snappily. SkyGlobe was a dream on it, exploding onto
the screen before you could even begin
to say “Jack Robinson.”
Alas,
somehow Unk had neglected to plug the eMachines into the UPS, and one day when
Miss D. and I were off on a trip—to Atlanta, I believe—disaster struck in the
form of intense August thunderstorms. When we arrived home, the eMachines was cold
iron. No big deal, I figgered. Just a momentary power loss. But what was that
smell? You guessed it, campers: fried. Fried, fried, fried, fried, fried.
Well,
boo-hoo. But I still had my Toshiba Satellite laptop running XP. Not as
convenient as sitting down to a desktop, but OK. Till a couple of weeks after
the eMachines gave up the ghost, the Toshiba did too, burning a large hole in
the power supply section on its mother board.
Both the
Satellite and the eMachines had paid for themselves during numerous trips
around Sol. I’d just schlep down to the dadgum Bestbuy and start the task of
replacing them, beginning with a new desktop. Which turned out to be an Acer,
which turned out to be a rather good computer. It still works to this day,
though it has been relegated to the back room upstairs; a tonier all-in-one Toshiba
widescreen now occupying the place of honor in the kitchen. Only one “problem”
with the Acer: it came with Windows Vista.
I suppose I
could have unloaded Vista and gone in search of a copy of Win XP. That didn’t
seem like much of an option, though. Not only was Unk a mite too busy at the time to worry
about such things—I just wanted to pull a PC out of a box, plug it in, and keep
on trucking—I wasn’t sure Vista was as bad as some of the goobers on the Internet
made it out to be. It wasn’t, really. The only programs I never could get to
run on it were Starry Night Pro Plus.
And, naturally, Skyglobe.
Starry Night Pro Plus is a decent and powerful program,
but I really didn’t have to have it on the kitchen computer. What I did need was a fast, simple planetarium.
I resorted to using TheSky 6 and
Cartes in that role, but neither really suited. They are big and capable, but
when I just want to see if Saturn is high up enough over the horizon to bother
with, they are more an aggravation than a help. What would I do? What would I do?
I’d heard a
lot about one relatively new freeware title, Stellarium. The users of this soft could be found raving about it
any day or cloudy night on, yep, the Cloudy Nights BBS. I hadn’t paid much
attention to their ravings, not while I could still run Skyglobe. When I couldn’t do that anymore, I became eager to hear
about the planetarium more than one amateur was calling “the ultimate in
realism.”
Gotta say,
y’all, that I was favorably impressed by the Stellarium web-site. I’d already
heard most of what was there discussed on CN at length, but seeing the
professional looking page and staring at them purty, purty screenshots put a
different perspective on things. It was clear Stellarium was not Cartes du
Ciel with dozens and dozens of huge catalogs and countless features, but
that was a good thing for my purposes. One other thing was crystal: this was a beautiful program that emphasized
a realistic depiction of the night sky. Sorta like Starry Night, but without the layers and layers of stuff.
As you-all
can imagine, I was quick to download and install the program. You can read all
about the process of doing that here, but
our focus this time out is on the usability of Stellarium for my particular purposes. I can tell you right at the
get-go that I didn’t much care for the program’s UI, its user interface. It
eschews the standard Win menus or even a Mac-like interface (Stellarium is available for Mac, Win,
and Linux at this time). In fact, there are no on-screen menus at all. Move your mouse to the left side
or the bottom of the screen and icon toolbars appear.
At first I
wasn’t just put out; I was ready to dump the program off’n my hard drive. It
was running in full-screen mode, and there wasn’t any way to get to other
programs or OS functions easily. After a little poking around, I found I could
switch Stellarium to windowed mode and save that as a default, so the program
was allowed to stay—for the moment. I can’t say I was happy about the icon bars
and lack of menus, though. It was different
from what I was used to, and when I am in a hurry I don’t like different. I also wasn’t happy with the
assignment of tasks to various icons. For example, some set-up things are under
the “options” icon and others are under “configuration” without seeming rhyme
or reason.
Despite
these quibbles, I settled in with Stellarium
and it became my “what’s up” program of choice through several years and several
versions. It is beautiful, it operates smoothly on any modern machine, and it is
useful. While it has quite a few
features, like eyepiece field views and even telescope control, they are normally
hidden and don’t annoy me.
There is no
perfect computer program, and there were a couple of things that kept me from
giving Stellarium four full stars.
One had to do with those consarned icon bars. Once I’ve got the sky onscreen,
it’s not unusual for me to want to advance time to see how things will look
later, like after nightfall, natch. Stellarium
does that well, advancing the sky smoothly with a rate controlled by the number
of clicks applied to the time-forward button. B-U-T. To get to the time-related
buttons, I had to use that automatically hiding toolbar (the one on the bottom
left of the screen) I didn’t like. More fatally, to change days, months, or
years, I had to go to the left side tool bar and hit the little clock icon. Me no
like. Yes, there were hot-key combos to control
time and date, but I had no interest in learning or remembering them.
What most
annoyed me, however, were the direction buttons or lack thereof. There are two
ways to change which horizon you are viewing with Stellarium. Most users grab
the sky with the mouse and drag it along. That is cool from a programming
perspective—it’s so smooth and nicely executed and all. I don’t like to work
that way, though—not always. Or you can scroll along with the arrow keys, which
is, if anything, more of a pain than click-dragging. I like to have the option of pressing N, S, E, and W buttons. This
was a continuing annoyance, but it didn’t stop me from using Stellarium on nearly a daily basis.
There didn’t seem to be an alternative, and there things remained. Until last
week.
In the
course of unpacking my new Celestron VX mount,
I naturally ran across the manual. Hell, y’all, I even looked at it. It was OK, but what was more interesting was what was
in the plastic bag with it—a DVD. I’d kinda expected NexRemote, but since Celestron now allows free download and
registration of that program on their website, I reckon there’s no reason to
put it in the box with new scopes anymore. What the DVD contained was a copy of
Software Bisque’s TheSkyX First Light
Edition (both Windows and Macintosh versions).
Bisque has
had a long relationship of this sort with Celestron, packing-in entry-level and
sub-entry-level versions of their TheSky
planetarium with Celestron gear. I expected First Light to be in the
“sub-entry-level” and that is more or less just what it is. It is even less
feature-laden than the normal lowest level of TheSkyX, TheSkyX Student Edition. If nothing else, Unk shore was
curious. Software Bisque has been a big name in astronomy software, and
especially planetarium programs, since TheSky
first came out on 5.25-inch floppy disks back in the 80s. I’ve used TheSky 6 off and on for years, but I had
yet to try the new one that superseded 6, TheSkyX. There wasn’t much reason I would have.
Even before
I began The Herschel Project, I’d been
moving away from planetarium programs, astronomy software that draws a virtual
sky on your computer screen, to planners, programs that can draw sky maps, too,
usually, but which are really more like giant databases, and which are much
more useful if you are, like Unk, interested in tackling big observing
projects. I had no doubt TheSkyX Professional was good, I just had no reason
to mess with it—or pay for it—since I’ve got a couple of real observing planner
heavyweights on my drive, SkyTools 3
and Deep Sky Planner 6.
I was idly
looking at that First Light DVD and began ruminating on the simple programs Software Bisque has
published alongside their magnum opuses over the years. Sometimes under their
name, sometimes under other names—like the fondly remembered Expert Astronomer. I searched for that one for a long time back
in the mid 90s before finally turning it up in a cutout software bin in
Phar-mor drugs. Expert Astrologer was, naturally, fracking
everywhere.
Expert Astronomer was the stripped-down, barebones
version of TheSky 4 (I think), and I remembered it as being simple, easy, and even
intuitive. If it hadn’t been for Skyglobe,
I would probably have been using Expert
Astronomer almost every day. Why not resurrect the old warhorse? I even knew
where the CD was. No dice. The Win 7
64-bit machines didn’t want to have a thing
to do with it. It actually installed on the Vista ‘puter and even tried to run,
but the O/S quickly reported General Protection Fault errors and shut the whole
mess down. Hokay, that was Bisque’s mid nineties version of a minimalist
planetarium. Guessed I might as well try their 2013 take on the same idee since
I had the DVD right there in my hot little hands.
Slammed the
First Light disk in the drive, loaded it up, and almost immediately went to the
Software Bisque website hunting a fix. The program looked right good
initially—except. Except it wouldn’t show constellation names. It’s surprising
makers of such good software have a website that seems so, well, harum scarum, but that is the way it is.
After trying to and finally remembering the password I needed to access the cotton-picking
support area (!), I wandered the website for a quite a spell till I finally ran
across a rather terse answer to my constellation lines problem on one of the
support forums: there was a program update.
The update
loaded without incident, the version that came up featured a somewhat
streamlined UI (good), and those dadgum constellation labels were finally
present. What did I think now that it was running right? Despite being in something
of a snit over the Bisque website’s aggravations and the bug in the program, I
couldn’t help but be impressed. In fact, if somewhat huffily, I had to admit
First Light was what I’d been looking for for years.
Start with pretty:
the program’s sky is every bit as beautifully rendered as Stellarium’s
in a somewhat different way. While the Bisques have gone out of their way to
make it attractive—the Winter Star Party horizon blew Unk’s mind—they have stayed
a little more in the legible camp than Stellarium’s authors. Constellation
lines are thicker, and labels and fonts a little more decipherable for my tired
old eyes. How long does it take to get this goodness onscreen? Not long folks,
not long. It is one of the more speedy-to-load planetariums I’ve encountered in
a while.
The things
I’d been missing in Stellarium? All
there. TheSkyX hews pretty close to
the standard Windows UI. Even if you’ve never used one of their products,
you’ll find First Light easy to figger out by clicking around in the familiar
and comforting File, Edit, Display, etc. menus. The initial version I’d loaded off
the DVD had an odd two-part interface:
menus and a “command center.” The finished version, which is what I am
calling the one I am using now, v10.2.0, does away with the command center
trope, and that is a good thing, I’d say.
How about
the view controls? Just what I wanted:
prominent, easy to see N, S, E, and W buttons to mash. You can drag First
Light’s sky around, just like you can Stellarium’s, but you don’t have to. And you don’t have to worry
about searching through a toolbar menu to save your current view (and
configuration) as in Stellarium; that is automatically saved when you exit.
The time
controls are some of the simplest and most elegant I’ve seen in a long while.
Normally the “Computer Clock” button is engaged and you are running off PC time.
Want to see 9 o’clock this P.M.? Right next to the computer clock button is a digital
time display. Click your mouse on the hours (for example), roll the mouse’s
scroll wheel, and the hours advance and so does the sky, smoothly and
beautifully. Same is true for the date display right next to the clock. I love
it.
You can also
change date and time, increment time, and do other things from the Display menu’s
“Date and Time,” which will show a sidebar with calendar, animation controls,
etc. If you don’t want to bring up that sidebar, tape-recorder style icon
buttons to step ahead or back in time and animate the sky are on the icon bar
(always present, no disappearing act) at the top of the screen.
Let’s say
you’re a novice who is after a simple program that will nevertheless get you
started observing. There’s plenty here for you. I didn’t try to enumerate deep
sky object counts, but it’s clear there are more than enough for Joe and Jane
Novice—a check of M13’s field showed up cute little NGC 6207 right away, and
there were IC sprites lurking nearby.
Brighter objects like the Messiers are accompanied by substantial information,
and sometimes even photos. Hell, First Light even has a mini-observing-planner
built-in.
So it’s all
gravy with TheSkyX First Light Edition? Not
quite, campers, not quite. The problem is getting
it if you aren’t in the market for a new Celestron rig. I thought I’d seen
it advertised for sale online, but apparently that is the next version up, TheSkyX Student Edition. According to a
statement I (finally) found on the Software Bisque site, First Light is only available as a pack-in with
(Celestron) scopes. Oh, you can find it available for free download online, but
not only is that illegal, visiting those sorts of sites can put your computer
at great risk.
So what do
you do? Well, you can haunt Cloudy Nights’ classifieds and the Astromart. I see
First Light disks for sale there frequently by owners who don’t realize there’s
gold on that there DVD. Most of the time, they are only asking 10 – 15 bucks. Or
you can upgrade a notch to the Student Edition, which has more STUFF, true, but
is still very much in the spirit of “simple and unencumbered.” Is a program of this
type worth the 50 bucks Student costs? If you are like me, muchachos, desperate
for that good five-cent cigar of a planetarium program, it dang sure is.
Next Time:
Mrs. Emma Peel Part II…
Comments:
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"I like to have the option of pressing N, S, E, and W buttons."
As a ex-SkyGlobe 3.5 user myself, I'm glad I'm not the only person who has been screaming this for the past fifteen years. :D
--Michael in Texas
As a ex-SkyGlobe 3.5 user myself, I'm glad I'm not the only person who has been screaming this for the past fifteen years. :D
--Michael in Texas
# posted by 
: 12:43 PM
: 12:43 PM
I just dug out the dvd that came with my Celestron 8se and installed The SkyX First Light Edition. Went searching for the update as you did, but apparently the update is only for Windows. I couldn't find anything Mac-specific. Guess I'll have to live without the constellations. Disappointing as it sounded like something I'd use too.
I always liked Skyglobe myself, never has been any better electronic planisphere. BTW, Expert Astronomer was written by a fellow in Dallas. First name Brian, last name lost in brain-fart. I knew him personally so that's how I know. We were both members of the Dallas club.
# posted by : 11:19 PM
: 11:19 PM
I was not a SkyGlobe user, but it still can be ran and on recent computers too:
http://knightstar.blogspot.com/2013/06/skyglobe-running-in-dosbox-on-fedora-16.html
Btw, I enjoyed your recent article in Sky & Telescope.
http://knightstar.blogspot.com/2013/06/skyglobe-running-in-dosbox-on-fedora-16.html
Btw, I enjoyed your recent article in Sky & Telescope.
As a SkyGlobe fan here in New Zealand for many, many years I, too, have long been searching for a replacement. This one is ideal! Thanks Rod for bringing it to our attention...I've had the CD on the shelf for about a year untried!
A cheap way to get it is to buy a Celestron FirstScope with it's accessory kit (the CD is in the kit) and for about $60US you get a basic but useful portable table top scope and SkyX First Light CD. If you didn't want the scope, the accessory kit alone with the CD is only $15US and has 3 basic eyepieces, a moon filter and simple finderscope!
BTW, my version had the constellation labels working right out of the box.
A cheap way to get it is to buy a Celestron FirstScope with it's accessory kit (the CD is in the kit) and for about $60US you get a basic but useful portable table top scope and SkyX First Light CD. If you didn't want the scope, the accessory kit alone with the CD is only $15US and has 3 basic eyepieces, a moon filter and simple finderscope!
BTW, my version had the constellation labels working right out of the box.
# posted by : 6:40 PM
: 6:40 PM
Sorry, bit of an update...my version (10.0.2) only has the constellation lines and figures but not the labels.
The other great thing about the program is that you can customise the horizon to fit your local situation.
The other great thing about the program is that you can customise the horizon to fit your local situation.
# posted by : 8:13 PM
: 8:13 PM
Can anyone help a non-nerd like me? I just want something simple like my old SkyGlobe (which I have on a hard floppy, but there's no slot for such disks in my new computer)? I'd like a free connection with something that tells me what planet or stars I'm looking at, on any given night.
Mr.GSD [@] juno.com
Fred
Mr.GSD [@] juno.com
Fred
Two easy possibilities...
Google Sky, which is part of Google Earth.
Microsoft Worldwide Telescope http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/
Google Sky, which is part of Google Earth.
Microsoft Worldwide Telescope http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/
Fred replies: I tried both "Google Sky" and "Google Earth" also http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/
but neither one showed me a map of the stars and planets at the present time (or tells me what I saw last night).
Mr.GSD[at]juno.com
but neither one showed me a map of the stars and planets at the present time (or tells me what I saw last night).
Mr.GSD[at]juno.com
After Uncle Rod's lengthy discussion, we're left with a recommendation for a replacement for SkyGlobe that you can't have unless you purchase a telescope.
Although I use Win. 7 64 bit now, I kept my old Win XP computer just so I can use SkyGlobe.
I'll keep looking for a suitable replacement.
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Although I use Win. 7 64 bit now, I kept my old Win XP computer just so I can use SkyGlobe.
I'll keep looking for a suitable replacement.
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