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Alachua Astronomy Club, Inc. |  Member Astronomical League |
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| FirstLight's First Ten Years |
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| 29°39' N, 82°21' W Altitude: 50 Meters (more or less) |
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| FirstLight is the official, monthly publication of the Alachua Astronomy Club (AAC), Gainesville, Florida USA. Copyright © 1987-99. All rights reserved. |
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SkyMap 2.2: A Fine Windows Astronomy Program
by Chuck Broward
SkyMap is an inexpensive Windows shareware sky program that is easy to use
and produces excellent views of the night skyRollo Medler described a "good" planetarium program that he had downloaded from a local BBS. So, I had to try it. SkyMap 22 now lives on my laptop and has become my primary tool for checking out the evening's sky prior to viewing.
The program author claims that while the program is not the fastest in the world, it is accurate. I cannot vouch for this, as I have no real way to check the program's accuracy. However, what I can check using either my eyes, or simple measurements with my C-8* indicate that the program works.
The program is shareware — that means that you can try it out for X number of days to see if you really want to pay good money for it. SkyMap begins with a screen that says you have "n" days left. I am curious as to what happens when "n" equals zero.
In the meantime I can dial up my favorite evening sky, superimpose my eyepiece or Telrad finder circles on the displays, show my friends where comet Hale-Bopp will be on my wedding anniversary in 1997 (April 1!), and print out charts. I have even saved one of the horizon maps as a BMP file which I now use as wallpaper on the computer.
So, all in all, I recommend trying out SkyMap 22 and perhaps even paying for it!
[For a more detailed review of three sky charting programs including SkyMap, see the article by J. Larkin in this issue. Ed.]
*C-8 A Celestron 8 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. [Ed.]
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