After long waiting since the talk by Roy Gould and Curtis Wong in Feb 2008, Microsoft WorldWide Telescope is finally available for download.
This is a really great art of masterpiece. It features the photos taken by ground-based observatories and space telescopes. There’re terrabytes of images at research grade resolution. I am not sure how to do research with it but it’s totally full of marvelous sceneries. Beware, your harddisk might be filled up with all these images. 
It also allows you to point your telescope to the target you currently focus on by installing the ASCOM component. This software certainly comes in handy when we do public outreach.
Explore it yourself!
Microsoft WorldWide Telescope
PS: I’m going to do a review of this stunning virtual telescope soon.
Lunar GOTO v1 is a software which allows you to select any of the 1,985 features and observe them on the Moon. You need a telescope mount which is LX200 commands compatible so that it’ll be able to drive the mount to GoTo the site you selected. For example, Meade LX series & ETX series, Skywatcher HEQ-6 and many other. Just check with the manufacturer or go through the forums whether your mount is applicable.
Since I haven’t requested the permission from the author to enclose the download link of the software here, you have to go to the location below. (Hey, not using your telescope!
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Adobe Photoshop CS2 is such a common digital photography software that almost every computer users know it. It is to edit every digital photographs. However, you need some powerful tools or the so called plugins to turn it into an astronomical image editor.
Photoshop is not able to export an image file as FITS extension (.fits), commonly used between scientific organisations and now become popular among amateur astronomers who own decent imaging platform.
FitsPlug is written by Eddie Trimarchi to enable photoshop to export astronomical image in fits extension. You get the plugin by email and a lifetime upgrade for USD30. It worths the price. If you can’t afford it, you may opt for the free version which is no longer supported and updated. For more information regarding this plugin, please visit FitsPlug.
There is a second choice and it’s free! It’s the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator v2.0. It can only support up to 16-bit FITS while FitsPlug can support up to 32-bit FITS. The difference isn’t obvious for amateur astronomers. However, I suggest you to experiment it yourselves. Its main page is here.
With either one of the plugins above, your Adobe Photoshop is now has the ability to export astronomical data in FITS.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the sun you saw through your solar telescope had the equator labeled and the poles marked? A new computer program from Les Cowley can help you sort out solar geography. It’s called TiltingSun.
You may download it here
If you think Starry Night Pro 5 is just too expensive, here is another killing application for you! Celestia 
This astronomy simulator is able to be runned on multiplatforms such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (X86). Therefore, it covers a big area!
Continue reading ‘Celestia’
I am really sorry for not updating AstronomyNotes for 10 days. I have been busy with my school activities and homeworks. 
Anyway, I am here to introduce a very nice astronomy simulator, Starry Night Pro 5! In my opinion, it’s the greatest astronomy simulator in the world! Most of the astronomers use astronomy simulators to simulate the moving of any celestial object. More than that, it can be used as a learning guides. It can tell you the science information of the specified celestial objects. What’s more are you expecting from this? It also has fantastic “Sky Guides” which lead you to the sky events!
Furthermore, you can choose where to observe the celestial objects. For example, on the surface of 9 Major Planets, their Moons and spaceship! It can control your telescope as well! It’s really wonderful, I am sure you want to give it a try!
Starry Night Website
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