|
|
Astronomy Software - Astronomy - Earth - Moon - Planets - Sky - Space - Stars - Sun More from Astrod - Asteroids - Moon Poems - NASA Glossary - Screen Savers - Solar System Site Nav - Privacy - Terms - Contact - Home |
The Pleiades, an open cluster of stars in the constellation of Taurus. NASA photo. 
The Pleiades, an open cluster of stars in the constellation of Taurus. NASA photo. The Pleiades (also known as M45 or the Seven Sisters) is an open cluster in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest to the Earth of all open clusters, probably the best known and certainly the most striking to the naked eye. Stars SoftwareStarmax Star Trails Creator - Starmax Star Trails Creator - This free stars software creates star trails from a sequence of photos. The website is French, just choose Astronomie from the menu and then click on the American Flag for the English version of the site (Why? :-)) Starmax is free for personal and non-commercial use. The author also gives advice as to use and recommends some other free software to help in making star trails. The photographs of the star trails produced (examples on website) really do look beautiful, and worth the effort to produce. Startrails example here. Astronomy Software from Astrod PicTools - PicTools - Visit the Sky Monsters website for Pictools. PICTools is free stars software to convert a PIC file, coming from IRIS software, into a 16bit per colour channel TIF file. The reason for such conversion utility is that IRIS does not allow to keep the total dynamic range of pixel values when you save a TIF image. Using PICTools instead, you can preserve the full range of pixel values that is possible to exploit after the stacking process. Astronomy Software from Astrod PP3 -- Celestial Chart Generation - PP3 - PP3 creates celestial charts. It generates resolution independent maps of very high graphical quality. They can be used for example as illustrations in books or on web pages. You may use own databases or free ones from the Internet. PP3 produces charts that may not be rich enough in detail for the professional astronomer but they are perfect as illustrations. A white dwarf star in orbit around Sirius (artist's impression). NASA photo. 
A white dwarf star in orbit around Sirius (artist's impression). NASA photo. This picture is an artist's impression showing how the binary star system of Sirius A and its diminutive blue companion, Sirius B, might appear to an interstellar visitor. The large, bluish-white star Sirius A dominates the scene, while Sirius B is the small but very hot and blue white-dwarf star on the right. The two stars revolve around each other every 50 years. White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to our Sun. The Sirius system, only 8.6 light-years from Earth, is the fifth closest stellar system known. Astronomy Software from Astrod Astronomy software from Astrod |