- #Stellarium vs skychart install#
- #Stellarium vs skychart software#
- #Stellarium vs skychart Pc#
- #Stellarium vs skychart windows#
Not only could Deepsky use Cartes as its charting engine, Cartes du Ciel could use the Hubble GSC files that shipped with Deepsky.īut it wasn’t just catalogs. There’s long been a cooperative symbiosis between CdC and Steve Tuma’s Deepsky. Not enough? If you had a source for the Hubble Guide Star Catalog (GSC), the program would happily use that, too. Stars? You could get the Tycho 2 catalog from Patrick’s site.
#Stellarium vs skychart install#
Maybe because that was something quantifiable, like the aperture of a telescope, and maybe because we were just on the cusp of the amateur astronomy data explosion where we suddenly went from “ALL THE MESSIERS, OVER 200 NGC OBJECTS, AND THE ENTIRE YALE BRIGHT STAR CATALOG!” to millions of stars and DSOs.ĬdC had the chops: the famous SAC (Saguaro Astronomy Club) deep sky catalog was included in the basic package, and you could easily download and install not just the NGC, but catalogs that added millions more objects, like the enormous PGC catalog of galaxies. Not only had Patrick worked the bugs out of his program, he’d radically improved the interface and made plenty of catalog data available.īack then, everybody was still obsessed with how many stars and deep sky objects a program contained. And by the time the first of the 2.7 versions appeared two years later, I knew we were there. I kept my eye on Cartes, and my watchfulness was rewarded the following year, 1999, when Patrick released the first full-up Cartes, Version 2.4, which is the grandpappy of what is probably the most widely used non-commercial amateur astronomy program of all time, Cartes du Ciel v2.76.Īs soon as I downloaded and booted 2.4, I could see the puzzle pieces were falling into place. Freeware programs come and go, but I had the feeling that if Patrick stuck with it, CdC might become a big success-in a small amateur astronomy way. Since the producer of Skyglobe had dropped out of the game, there really weren’t any freeware astronomy standouts (actually, Klass-M Software’s Skyglobe was shareware). I liked what I’d seen, though, and hoped the author would continue to develop his program. The user interface left me slightly baffled, too. It was a little slow at times and lacked a little in usefulness as well as usability.
#Stellarium vs skychart windows#
It ran OK on my Windows 98 box, but, truthfully, it wasn’t quite there. The version of Cartes that went on my Compaq Pentium must have been an early one, likely prior to version 2.0.
#Stellarium vs skychart software#
CdC was not commercial software or even shareware, it was free, given away by its Swiss author, Patrick Chevalley. He was the first astronomy software guru I’d run into, and I figured if he thought the program was worth a look, it was worth a look. Probably it was my late friend Jeff Medkeff. I’m not sure who first told me about Cartes du Ciel. For those reasons, I was still clinging to that hoary DOS (what came before Windows, younguns) application, SkyGlobe. There wasn’t much in the way of animation, planetary simulations, or even horizons.
It was more a computerized atlas than it was a simulacrum of the sky. Megastar was a fantastic program, throwing up the deepest charts I had ever seen, but it was weak on the sky simulation part of the planetarium equation.
My favorite was Emil Bonanno’s famous (still) Megastar.
#Stellarium vs skychart Pc#
I was experimenting with an early “planning” type program, Deepsky, but mostly I was using planetariums, programs whose whole raison d’être is to display a simulation of the night sky on your PC screen. Me and Cartes go a long ways back, back to the late 1990s. I intend to give you the straight poop on Stellarium real soon, but for now let’s focus on everybody’s fave freeware, Cartes du Ciel, “Sky Charts.” It’s way different from other astro gear where “more expensive” usually equals “more better.” Price doesn’t always have much to do with how well an astro-program works or looks, as is amply demonstrated by Cartes du Ciel (CdC) and Stellarium. Astronomy software is strange and confusing.
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