The latest release of Starry Night Pro Plus, version 5.0, has an astounding new feature that really blew me away: a full-color image of the entire night sky. The AllSky CCD Image Mosaic has been painstakingly mapped to overlay precisely with the existing Starry Night databases. The integration is seamless. You simply launch Starry Night as you normally do, but the sky that fades up is superbly naturalistic. You can see below the difference between the old sky and the new...
Sewn together from 20,000 individual images, the AllSky Image contains 6.44 billion pixels, spread over five levels of resolution, meaning you can now plan your night's viewing with both the precision of Starry Night's charts and the realism of, well, reality! Main Sequence Software spent 5 years creating the AllSky Image. Click here for the full story.
If you find that AllSky isn't your cup of tea, like everything else in Starry Night you have complete control over its display. A new tab in the OPTIONS:STARS panel allows you to set the quality of display, or you can turn it off completely.
Besides AllSky, the latest version of Starry Night Pro Plus contains a host of improvements and new functions. More about those in April's Starry Night Times.
Sean O'Dwyer, Starry Night Times Editor |