Sky Software

Astronomy Software from Astrod

Stig's Sky Calendar - Stig's Sky Calendar - Calendar that tracks and shows celestial events in the sky.

Astronomy Software from Astrod

Stellarium - Stellarium - Stellarium is free GPL software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL.

With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.

Stellarium is also used in planetariums.

Stellarium Features:

Sky:

Over 120000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue with name and info for the brightest ones.
Planets and major satellites in real time (with position computation accurate enough for eclipse or transit simulation).
Asterisms of the 88 constellations with their names.
Mythological figures of the 88 constellations.
Images of more than 70 nebulas (Orion, M31 etc..).
Photo-realistic Milky Way.
Star twinkling.
Shooting Stars.

Landscape & visualization:

Skinnable landscape (ground, fog, mapping of fisheye pictures).
Ultra fast realistic atmosphere rendering (sunsets, sunrises etc...).
Automatic eye adaptation to sky luminance using physiologic model.
Grids in equatorial and azimuthal coordinates.
Equator and ecliptic coordinates lines.

Navigation & rendering:

Smooth real time intuitive navigation.
Powerful zoom to see planets and nebulae like through a telescope.
Equatorial and altazimuthal mount mode.
Standard perspective and wide angle (fisheye) projection modes (perfect for a planetarium dome).
Time control (real time and accelerated time modes).
Graphical menu for simple use.
Clickable stars, planets and nebulas, with information.
Windowed and fullscreen modes.
Full dome (180°) projection mode for planetariums.
Text user interface for planetariums.

Astronomy Software from Astrod

Aladin Sky Atlas - Aladin Sky Atlas - Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas allowing the user to visualize digitized images of any part of the sky, to superimpose entries from astronomical catalogs or personal user data files, and to interactively access related data and information from the SIMBAD, NED, VizieR, or other archives for all known objects in the field (see available data). Aladin is particularly useful for multi-spectral cross-identifications of astronomical sources, observation preparation and quality control of new data sets.

The Aladin sky atlas is available in three modes: a simple previewer, a Java applet interface and a Java Standalone application.

The Aladin Sky Atlas is a Java-based star atlas for astromers. The Aladin Sky Atlas retrives unretouched photographs of stars.

Astronomy Software from Astrod

Sky Screen Saver for Windows - Sky Screen Saver for Windows - A free sky screensaver for Microsoft Windows by John Walker.

The Sky Screen Saver shows the sky above any location on Earth, including stars (from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue of more than 9000 stars to the 7th magnitude), the Moon in its correct phase and position in the sky, and the position of the Sun and all the planets in the sky.

Outlines, boundaries, and names of constellations can be displayed, as well as names and Bayer/Flamsteed designations of stars brighter than a given threshold. A database of more than 500 deep-sky objects, including all the Messier objects and bright NGC objects can be plotted to a given magnitude. The ecliptic and celestial equator can be plotted, complete with co-ordinates.

To fulfill its mission as a screen saver, the sky map shifts position on the display every 10 minutes to avoid burning in those few components of the display which do not move as the Earth revolves.

The Sky Screen Saver is in the public domain. This free sky screen saver is available for Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP.

Astronomy Software from Astrod

DeepSkyStacker - DeepSkyStacker - Freeware for astrophotographers that simplifies all the pre-processing steps of deep sky pictures. With Deep Sky Stacker you are able to: Registering, Stacking, Simple post-stacking processes to quickly view the final result. Saving the resulting image to a TIFF or FITS file (16 or 32 bit). After a shooting night you give all your pictures (light frames, darks frames, offset/bias frames, flat frames) to DeepSkyStacker and you go to bed. The next morning (or is it afternoon?) you can see the result and start post-processing. Deep Sky Stacker is free sky software.

DeepSkyStacker : Main Features: Automatic registration of a set of pictures Automatic detection of stars using all the picture area Preview of registered stars Sub pixel registration Automatic derotation Automatic creation and use of offsets, flats and darks frames Sub pixel alignment and stacking Supported bitmaps formats : 8, 16 and 32 bit colour and monochrome TIFF files, 8, 16, 32 and 64 bit colour and monochrome FITS files, JPEG, BMP, PNG Native use of RAW files from most DSLRs (CR2, NEF, CRW, DNG ...) without using an intermediate file format (TIFF or other). Darks, Flats and Offsets computed from and applied directly to the RAW picture before any interpolation. Stacking methods: average, median, kappa-sigma clipping, auto adaptive weighted average, entropy weighted average, maximum... Preview of all pictures (including RAW) Simple post-processing with RGB levels, luminance curve and saturation adjustments. Save the resulting picture to 16 or 32 bit TIFF or FITS files with or without adjustments applied. Simple and intuitive user interface Optimal memory usage: the same amount of memory is required to register and stack 10 or 500 pictures. Optimal usage of all available processors (hyperthreaded, multiprocessors, duo and quad core processors) English, Spanish, French, Czech, Italian, Catalan, German, Dutch and Traditional Chinese versions

Astronomy Software from Astrod

Astronomy software from Astrod