User`s guide

Starry Night Pro Plus 183
Precision: At wide fields of view, Starry
Night uses a grid system to line up the
AllSky image with the computer generated
stars. Moving the Precision slider towards
“More Precise” provides a better match
between the photographic stars in the
AllSky image and the computer generated
stars.This takes more processing power. If
you find Starry Night slow while scrolling
the sky, move the slider towards “Faster
Scrolling”.
Quality: The AllSky image is a seameless
mosaic of many large image files that are
loaded in on demand when you zoom in or
scroll around the sky. To help minimize
delays incurred while loading, you can
selet a lower resolution image set. Each
step up in quality doubles the pixel
resolution of the image. The High quality
option, will only be available if your video
card has 96 MB of VRAM and higher.
Display options: Allows you to turn off
other images when the AllSky image is on.
This will eliminate a ‘double image’
effect. You can also select to not display
the AllSky image at fields of view of less
than one degree.
Tip: More information about the AllSky
image and how it was created, is available
in the SkyGuide pane. In SkyGuide, click
on the Exclusive to Starry Night Pro Plus
link to learn more about this feature.
Note: The AllSky is a static image. We do
take into account precession so that the
AllSky photographic stars match the
computer generated stars. Unfortunately,
the AllSky image can not show the proper
motion of the stars. For dates far into the
distant past or future, the stars in the
AllSky image might not match the
computer generated stars which do take
into account proper motion.
AllSky CCD Mosaic Frequently
Asked Questions
Other planetarium programs present
images of certain deep-sky objects, or
allow you to click on an object to see a
picture. Is Starry Night the same?
The AllSky image in Starry Night presents
the ENTIRE sky as a full-color, seamless
mosaic, and at several resolution levels
dependent upon your zoom setting. An
important advantage of this is the
consistent resolution, color and depth of
coverage, eliminating the uncertainties of
comparing images from many and varied
sources. And navigating your way around,
or zooming in or out, is only a mouse click
away.
Starry Night is the world's only available
fully interactive, image-based digital sky
atlas/planetarium software.
What is the AllSky image quality like?
It is very good! Of course there are
unavoidable limitations, which become
apparent mainly when zooming in to near
0.5 degrees, the smallest field-of-view
setting. In order to make the image
database manageable it had to be
compressed. We developed a proprietary
compression scheme which preserves
much of the original image quality, but
when zoomed in enough the compression
artifacts do start to show up. Remember,
you have the entire sky at your disposal,
and it's fitted on one DVD.