Starry Night Pro Plus Astronomy Software, Version 6.3

For the advanced amateur astronomer, the full-color AllSky CCD mosaic, sophisticated telescope controls and comprehensive observational tools included in Starry Night Pro Plus version 6 will engage you in the hobby like no other software.

The biggest single addition to Starry Night software since its inception, the full-color AllSky CCD image mosaic of the entire nightsky visible from Earth weighs in at 6.44 billion pixels in size. Named AllSky for its uniform coverage from pole to pole, it's a single picture of the whole sky that has been precisely mapped to Starry Night's computer generated stars and databases.

View on your computer screen an image better than the best-trained human eye can capture in real-time viewing through a telescope ona "good seeing" night. See the entire Milky Way in exquisite detail and then zoom in to explore dust lanes and nebulae. Instead of dots and circles, you will see an actual photo of a star or a deep sky object.

Smoothly and swiftly navigate this full color photograph of the entire night sky, to a limiting magnitude of 14-15. Five years in development, the AllSky CCD mosaic is comprised of about 20,000 individual images, originally imaged at a resolution of 12 arcseconds per pixel with a scientific grade, custom built AP9E CCD camera.

The AllSky image in Starry Night presents the ENTIRE sky as a full-color, seamless mosaic at 5 resolution levels depending on your zoom setting. This consistent resolution, color and depth of coverage eliminates the uncertainties of comparing images from many andvaried sources. Zoom from the widest possible view of 180 degrees to 0.5 degree field of view.

If you have the processing power, set the AllSky image to be more precise and a better match between the photographic stars in the AllSky image and the Starry Night stars. For the highest quality AllSky image, you will need a video card with a minimum of 96 MB VRAM.

Version 6 includes an additional 6 GB of the AllSky image in DDS texture format, which enables the AllSky image to load up to 20X faster.

In addition, at wide fields of view, the AllSky image can be rendered via shaders for perfect rendering accuracy and a dramatic speed improvement, but you will need a higher-end OpenGL 2.0 capable graphics card to see this phenomenal improvement. We recommend 128 MB nVidia GeForce 6600 (or higher) or ATI Radeon X800 (or higher).

In all, Starry Night Pro Plus version 6 has over 25 new features that bring more power and control to your observing and imaging. Starry Night Pro Plus will change how you look at the night sky.