Stellarium 0.19
stellarium.org
stellarium.org
"KStars ... provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes up to 100 million stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects,all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets, asteroids, supernovae, and satellites. For students and teachers, it supports adjustable simulation speeds in order to view phenomena that happen over long timescales... For the amateur astronomer, it provides an observation planner, a sky calendar tool, and an FOV editor to calculate field of view of equipment and display them... Included with KStars is Ekos astrophotography suite, a complete astrophotography solution that can control all INDI devices including numerous telescopes, CCDs, DSLRs, focusers, filters, and a lot more. Ekos supports highly accurate tracking using online and offline astrometry solver, autofocus and autoguiding capabilities, and capture of single or multiple images using the powerful built in sequence manager."
Celestia also helped me understand how alone and isolated is our planet. I would move the focus to mars, then sun, then nearby stars, then my personal favorite Alcyone, then out of the galaxy. It showed me how vast the universe is.
Stellarium helped me see the stars from earth. Celestia helped me see the earth from the stars.
Amazing software that make my childhood feels wonderful.
Thank You!
Also if you opened Stellarium and looked at the Pleiades where Alcyone resides, you could see blue-ish formation and it looks beautiful for me.
Edit: Whence the downvotes? It’s a 20 year old program. I know many OS devs have a certain aversion of making the jump to 1.0, but semver is a useful concept, and versioning that looks like semver, but in practice is not, is not the best way to communicate the maturity of your software to potential users.
Seeing v0.19 version feels misleading and discouraging new users to try it out of curiosity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase
> Hal Pawluk, who handled marketing for the nascent company, decided to change the name to the more business-like "dBase". Pawluk devised the use of lower case "d" and all-caps "BASE" to create a distinctive name. Pawluk suggested calling the new product version two ("II") to suggest it was less buggy than an initial release. dBASE II was the result and became a standard CP/M application along with WordStar and SuperCalc.[15]
I had a tiny improvement in this release: https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/pull/612
A person may have learned to identify many objects in the sky. The planetarium feature (motion at various rates) makes it much easier (and faster) to comprehend how it all fits together at various times of the day and of the year. Fascinating.
For example, turn on the line of the ecliptic and watch its motion around 'due south' as the day goes by. (Wild at this time of year.) Or tell the program to 'track' a constellation (e.g. Orion) and then fast-forward by days to see how it rises/falls wrt the horizon because of the Earth's tilt. Or watch (and try to figure out) why the Moon moves all over the sky.
In relation, does anyone have good telescope/camera recommendations? I've been looking for something relatively cheap, that is less than €5000, that can take good photos and be used with the naked eye?
I am looking at celestrons and sky-watchers but I'm a complete noob here when it comes to judging optic qualities.
Regardless, more aperture is always better. :)
You need a quality mount and a good CCD. Some of the best photo setups I've seen use use refractors with a quality CCD. Search for Atik 414EX. The example photos on their sight tell you what hardware was used. Might give you some idea.
A used DSLR with a short focal length lens can take nice wide angle short exposures with just a tripod. That'll run you about $150. You can build a barn door tracker from hardware store parts that'll allow you to lengthen your exposures.
You can get a nice telescope for visual use brand new for under $500. Lots of places sell Dobsonians that are pretty much ready to go out of the box. If you want to go for a more traditional mount + OTA (optical tube assembly), that gets more expensive. Used equipment is nice because amateurs tend to take care of their optics and after the initial depreciation, optics tend to hold their value. Check the Cloudy Nights classifieds section. (Actually, just check Cloudy Nights in general, lots of friendly, knowledgeable people there.)
I put together my visual setup (127mm SkyWatcher Mak-Cass, heavy duty photo tripod, and a Stellarvue M-2 mount) for around $700 excluding the cost of eyepieces. The sky is the limit on eyepieces, but most EPs between $40 and $100 work just fine. I shopped used and watched for sales. What many people don't realize (including myself when I was starting out) is that you want to invest as much, or more than the cost of the OTA into your mounting solution if you want to get any enjoyment out of the hobby. Even if you're just doing visual work. Skimp on your foundation, and the whole setup will wobble all over the place, making it hard to see anything, and that's not fun or relaxing.
It's putting visual and photography together that gets expensive. When you want to take long exposures at high magnification, you want a really solid equatorial mount with high-resolution encoders. Those start at $1000 on the low end. You'll probably want a better CCD to image with (a few hundred bucks). Then you can get into tracking scopes (even the expensive mounts accumulate error after a while). It's not really the main scope that's expensive, it's all the stuff you need to support it.
Anyway, actually looking at your question, as long as you stay away from the low end stuff, Celestron and SkyWatcher both make fine OTAs. My recommendation is do not get an all-in-one package, especially under $400 unless it's a Dobsonian. The mount will be garbage. You can take short exposures with a DSLR + just about any OTA and EQ mount that will support the weight. (You won't probably won't get a flat field though). I'm pretty sure people also image with Celestron C8s or C10s which are relatively inexpensive.
A lot of this is armchair observations, as I've managed to convince myself to stay solely on the visual side of amateur astronomy because it's easier and cheaper. There are enough amateurs with $20k rigs that you can enjoy their nice images of all the popular DSOs without putting in the blood, sweat, and tears.
Which sounds stupid, but phone cameras tend to do well with short focal-length, and the large "viewfinder" of your phone's screen helps a lot.
Although the last time we tested this in detail was 2009. The Image-Sensor Processor (ISP) in current cell-phones changes the game.
Sounds like a waste of time, but my favorite onserving sessions are "sidewalk astronomy" -- sharing simple direct observation with people who have never used a telescope. I encourage direct, hands-on experimentation with a minimum of equipment.
Beyond that, of course you pretty much need super-cooled CCD and the best telescope mount you can afford. Often the mount is the key, more $$$ than the telescope itself.
Deep-sky observation, faint nebulae are smudges of light to visible eye even through a big scope. You want a big light-bucket, like a Dobsonian, which emphasize mirror size rather than expensive mounts or optical clarity.
For your first telescope, buy a good set of auto-stabilizing binoculars. Large field of view means you can get used to finding things on the sky. You can take them anywhere.
Big scope is like desktop computer. Binoculars like the cell-phone in your pocket.
To give you some idea of what is possible, here's a few images I took the other night with less than $1000 of equipment.
https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/332758-a-quick-tour-of-or...
Celestia was THE play tool I used to play with my new screens/graphic cards for a very, very long time -- not a silly game.