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Past Product Reviews |
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| Reviewed from Sky & Telescope Magazine, June 2002, p.66, published by Sky Publishing Corporation. Text of the review is reproduced here with permission. |
In Pursuit of Dream Software
DeepSky 2000 |
| Review by David Ratledge |
If you could specify your dream software for planning deep-sky observing, what would it be like? You certainly would need all the popular astronomical catalogs built in, as well as many specialized ones. It would have to be easy to use with a familiar interface that requires minimal learning. Search facilities must be comprehensive with the option for sophisticated ad hoc queries when required. When you've made your selections it must be able to print reports and legible finder charts with a space for sketching your observations. And of course it must be cheap – we deep-sky observers need to save our pennies for a Nagler Type 5 eyepiece! Deepsky 2000 claims all this an more, but does it deliver?
Starting with the last criterion first, the program is available in two versions: one downloadable via the Internet and the other on CD-ROM. The former will run for 30 days before a $25 registration fee becomes due. The latter costs $45 but includes the Hubble Guide Star Catalog and saves a potential huge bill for those who have to pay online-connection charges. I tried both versions. By all means, test-drive the downloadable version, but the CD-ROM for only $20 more is a sensible option.
What about the included data catalogs? Deepsky 2000 is supplied with 49. Surprisingly, it didn't have the Caldwell Catalog to make a nice round 50. However, adding it with the import wizard was not a problem. It would be senseless to list all the built-in catalogs here. My interests were well served with Abell's galaxy clusters, Arp's peculiar galaxies, and Hickson's compact galaxy groups. Other wider interests are likewise well catered to with the catalogs for double stars, bright nebulae, dark nebulae, planetary nebulae, quasars, supernova remnants, and globular star clusters. There's something for everyone. Keep a watch for out-of-date epochs in several catalogs. It is essential to tick the “precess” box to convert them to your observation date.
So far so good, but what about getting at those data without having to learn something new? Here Deepsky 2000 excels by adopting a spreadsheet look and feel. So if you are accustomed to Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 then the interface is reassuringly familiar.
Included menu options make listing Messier and Herschel objects easy with a "what's up tonight?" feature. To display less-common objects I used the Find option to load the particular catalog I wanted to search (a wild card pulls the whole catalog into the spreadsheet layout). I initially struggled trying to sort the data. It would have been nice if they could be sorted by clicking the column header, as you can with Windows Explorer. Instead I had to read the manual. There I found that all I had to do was click on the column header and right-click the mouse to display a menu with the sort options.
Deepsky 2000 offers far more sophisticated ad hoc searches. These use the structured query language (SQL), the same as most of the world's premier database-management systems. Thus, it is suggested that you obtain an introductory book to SQL before embarking on these advanced types of selections.
Once all the target objects have been chosen, you have various options for reports (specific columns to be printed), finder charts (in a three-pane style for different scales), images (more than 400 NGC objects), visual descriptions by other observers (for about 3,500 objects), and an observation form for sketching your eyepiece impressions. However, what really wowed me was the automatic retrieval from the Digitized Sky Survey of an image of any selected object - provided you have an Internet connection.
Deepsky 2000 does much more than I have described here. The manual is more than 120 pages, so it will take plenty of cloudy nights to explore all the options. But is it that dream software? Although that's a tall order, for the price it is hard to fault it. Allow me to answer in another way: Normally I am very wary of taking up hard-disk space with new software. I prefer to run from the CD-ROM until I am totally convinced of its usefulness. Deepsky 2000 is now on my hard disk.
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| David Ratledge can usually be found in his virtual home at www.deep-sky.co.uk. His new book, Observing the Caldwell Objects, has recently been published by Springer-Verlag. |
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