User`s guide

82 Starry Night User’s Guide
stars will only be visible if you chose the
“Full Install” or the “Custom Install”
options when you installed Starry Night.
The entire USNO-A2 star database
contains 500 million stars! This database
is far too large to fit on a CD or DVD, so
Starry Night allows you to download
portions of this database from the Internet.
See “Adding Objects 3 (Stars)
” on
page 169 for more information.
Tip: Our Sun is an ordinary star. However,
in Starry Night, it is a member of the
“Planets/Moons” database, not the
“Stars” database.
Databases 3 (Deep Space)
This includes all objects outside of our
galaxy. It also includes databases that
include objects both within and outside of
our galaxy. For example, the Messier
catalogue includes globular clusters,
which are inside our galaxy, but it also
includes other galaxies, so it is classified
in the “Deep Space” category.
Messier Objects: This category includes
the 110 Messier objects, originally
catalogued by French astronomer Charles
Messier and colleagues in the late 1700’s.
Messier was trying to identify all “fuzzy”
deep space objects that might be mistaken
for comets. The Messier objects are a
mixture of star clusters, nebulae, and
galaxies (plus a few objects that don’t fit
into any of these categories). Many of the
Messier objects are favourite targets for
amateur astronomers. For each object in
the Messier catalogue, Starry Night
includes a detailed image and a text
description with observing tips.
Bright NGC Objects: This database is a
grab bag of famous deep space objects
(mostly star clusters, galaxies, and
nebulae) that were excluded from the
Messier catalogue for one reason or
another. Many of the objects were missed
by Messier because they are more easily
seen from the Southern Hemisphere, and
could only be seen low on the horizon (if
at all) from Messier’s base in Paris. For
each object in this catalogue, Starry Night
includes a detailed image and a text
description with observing tips.
NGC-IC: The NGC/IC (New General
catalogue/Index catalogue) is a more
extensive listing of star clusters, galaxies
and nebulae, It was originally compiled by
J.C. Dreyer from 1888-1908 and includes
about 13 000 objects. Starry Night uses an
updated version of this database, compiled
by Wolfgang Steinecke and converted into
Starry Night format by Peter Enzerink,
which fixes many errors in the original
catalogue. Find out more about the NGC-
IC catalogue on the web at
www.ngcic.com
.
Tully 3-D Database: A collection of nearly
28 000 galaxies. The neat thing about this
database is that it contains 3-dimensional
positions of these galaxies. You can use
Starry Night’s controls to view the
3-dimensional arrangement of these
galaxies.Choose Favourites->Deep Space
from the main menu to view some sample
files that use this database to render some
3-dimensional extragalactic views of our
universe.