|
|
|
| |
|
| |
 |
if you would like to advertise on this site.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Past Product Reviews |
 |
|
 |
| Reviewed from the SkyWatch May/June 2000 newsletter, published by Rod Mollise, Mobile Astronomical Society. The review is reproduced with permission. |
| DeepSky 2003 |
| Rod Mollise |
Deepsky first hit my hard drive about two years ago in one of its earlier incarnations, Deepsky 98. It was a reasonably solid and useful program then, if one with a few quirks, and I used it happily off and on until I heard that author Steven Tuma was preparing a substantial upgrade, Deepsky 2000. With the release of 2000 one minute after midnight on 1 January of this year, the program has gone from being something I'd occasionally bring up and play with to an application that is absolutely vital for my personal observing programs. What's changed? And what's so special about Deepsky 2000 anyway?
Following first time installation (which is very smooth and problem free), the novice DS2000 user is in for a tremendous shock. I mean, we all know what a deep sky program does, right? You run the thing, a star chart appears on screen, you arrange field size to suit, locate objects you're interested in, and print charts when you're done. All the popular programs-Megastar, Skymap Pro, The Sky and on and on-use this simple metaphor of a desktop star atlas. Which is fine. But it's not necessarily the best way of helping you plan and conduct deep sky observing sessions. Unlike its peers, running Deepsky 2000 results in a boring-looking spreadsheet-style display greeting the user. Boring, maybe, but very, very powerful.
Instead of manipulating a representation of the night sky, you display desired objects from the DS database in spreadsheet style fashion. Once the objects you fancy are on screen, you have numerous options available. Right-clicking on a particular object will present a submenu offering choices ranging from charting to logging to displaying object details. Exactly where you go then depends on what you want to do. But a typical Deepsky 2000 session at Chaos Manor South works something like this:
Once the program is up and running, I'll hit the "select" tab at the bottom of the screen to choose a constellation of interest. I normally work one constellation at a time, but multiple constellations can be selected if desired. Filters for magnitude and other variables are set by using convenient "range" tabs at the bottom of the screen. Pushing the "refresh" button retrieves in-range objects from the database and displays them in spreadsheet format. The resulting spreadsheet can be sorted as desired, quickly and easily.
My next step is to choose the deep sky objects I'm interested in and put these into an observing list, or, as DS2000 refers to it, an "Observing Plan." Clicking on the Plan column with your left mouse button will add an object to your Plan. Once you've finished, you can choose "show objects in Plan" from the planner section of the main menu bar. This will replace the initial spreadsheet with one showing only the objects you've selected and "recorded" in your Plan. If desired, this Plan can be saved for future use.
When my list is fleshed out, it's chart time. Chart plotting is accomplished with ease. Right clicking on an object in the Plan will bring up the "select" menu again, and you'll find several charting choices, including "plot selected object" and "plot all objects centered on selected object." You might want to plot your charts based on the original spreadsheet rather than your Observing Plan, actually, if you want a detailed map showing a rich selection of the deep sky objects in a given area. The way DS2000 works is that only the objects displayed on the spreadsheet will be plotted when you select a "plot all objects" option.
However you choose to arrange your charts, you'll be very, very pleasantly impressed at the beauty and utility of the sky maps DS can produce. A recent review of Deepsky 2000 in Sky and Telescope magazine was quite favorable, but I felt that it slighted the program by neglecting to detail its mapping capabilities. Deepsky 2000's charting routines were done by Dean Williams, who also did the excellent TUBA atlas CD program that accompanies Phil Harrington's Touring the Universe Through Binoculars book. Everything that you'd expect from any serious astronomy program is here: excellent printing, Telrad and eyepiece field markers, and, naturally, the entire Hubble Guide Star Catalog.
After I've printed my charts, I'll often return to the Observing Plan spreadsheet and print "object details" for those deep sky treasures that are new to me. This display, accessed from the right-click menu, includes most of what you'll want, including RA/DEC, NGC codes, magnitude if available, and an image if available. The one thing I missed on the info screens was galaxy morphological types. At this time of year, the Spring, I'm observing many galaxies and need to know whether a specific example is an "E" or an "S" or an "SB," etc. This is not a fault of the program, but a reflection of the data available in the source version of the NGC used. This is not really a problem, though, since a few mouse clicks can bring you all the information you desire.
Deepsky 2000 is "Internet aware." Bringing up your Internet service (if you use dial-up), or just clicking on a menu item (if you have a LAN Internet connection) delivers a wealth of professional-level data. For galaxies, one of the most useful features is direct access to NED, NASA's Extragalactic Database. Selecting this option opens a window in the program displaying the NED website. You can then enter your object ID and in a minute or two you will have all the background information (or likely much more than) you'll ever need. It's often helpful to obtain a POSS (Palomar Sky Survey) plate to help in object location and identification. DS offers this facility, retrieving the plate for your selected object from the Space Telescope Science Institute's Digital Sky Survey site with a single click.
Almost ready for that run. All I need now is a form to record my observations. Looking at the top menu bar's logging options choices reveals a "logsheet" selection, which causes a custom log page to be printed for your selected object. This will be filled in with pertinent data and will feature a couple of "field circles" at the bottom of the page in case you want to draw the object of your desire when you have it in view.
After a nice long night of productive observing, I always log my objects for future reference. And DS2000 makes this incredibly easy. Bring up the saved observing plan, click on an object with the right mouse button, and select "view/edit logbook for selected object." Here, you'll find forms to accommodate all the data from your observing run. You can also attach a drawing or CCD image of the object to your entry. Believe it or not, DS2000 features a pretty full-featured image processing program to help you do this.
All you have to do is bring up the image processing program module, select the Twain option to enable your scanner, put your logsheet in said scanner, bring your drawing into the program, and process as desired for best appearance using the image processor's many tools. When you're satisfied, it's surprisingly easy to attach the image to your log entry. If you've made a CCD image of the wonder, you can append that to the log in much the same way. You can access the completed log entry in the future using tabs at the bottom of the screen when the object is onscreen and selected. Individual log entries can also be retrieved using the main program menu's logbook selecton. Mr. Tuma has helpfully included many log files from accomplished observers like Barbara Wilson to get you started.
That's the way I use DS2000, but there's really a lot more to the program than that. After using it for five months now, I still feel that I've only barely scratched the surface of its features. Following are some of the program's options along with comments about the ones I've used: |
 |
708,000 deep sky objects from 60 catalogs. This must be some kind of a record. Sure, most of these are frighteningly dim galaxies, but it gives me a warm fuzzy to know I can look up just about anything in the sky. If this ain't enough, it's easy to import more catalogs from the Internet.
|
|
What's Up Wizards. These allow you to easily display spreadsheets containing categories of objects, the Messiers for example, that are visible from your site at a given time and date.
|
|
Quick Searches. If you just want a quick "read" on a particular object, DS2000 can do that too. Click the little binocular icon, enter object catalog number and catalog, and away you go.
|
|
LX-200, and Nexstar support. If you're the proud owner of one of these goto scopes, you can use Deepsky to control your baby in the field. Imagine telling passerby that your little NS5 can "goto" any one of 413,000 objects!
|
|
Solar System support. Complete Ephemeris information for the Moon, Sun, planets and asteroids. You can, naturally, plot these objects on your charts if you so desire.
|
|
Plot detailed star charts. Since this program uses the GSC, you have access to stars down to magnitude 15.5. It will also print custom finder charts including beautiful tri-panel finder charts showing three different field sizes to help you easily track down a deep sky denizen.
|
|
Charts include shapes for many nebulae and Milky Way outlines. Custom eyepiece fields for specific eyepieces and telescope focal lengths can be superimposed on charts.
|
|
Atlas printing. This is a feature peculiar to DS2000 as far as I know. It allows you to print a range of RA and dec if you want to develop your own customized hard-copy star atlas.
|
|
Internet features include direct access to many astronomy-related sites and utilities from within the program and the capability of synchronizing your PC clock with Internet time services.
|
|
Night vision mode.
|
|
Hundreds of included deep sky images.
|
| |
|
But no program is worth a tinker's damn, no matter what it's features, if it doesn't run right. I always had good luck with the program's predecessor, Deepsky '98. But some folks apparently weren''t as lucky, reporting difficulties with stability and bugs. 2000 has cleaned up just about all these issues and is now a very robust application. Of course, any program this complicated is bound to have a few lurking problems. I, for example, found that accidentally right-clicking on an attached logbook image would cause a program crash. Luckily, Steve has been very diligent about exterminating bugs and issuing updates frequently. I have no doubt that this minor problem will be quickly eradicated. In any event, none of the minor bugs and rough edges has caused me to lose data.
The program's user interface has also been considerably improved in this release. It all seems very intuitive now. It must be admitted, though, that this is a big honking program with countless features, and it will necessarily present a marginally steep learning curve for the novice user. I found Steve's documentation to be thorough and understandable. Performance-wise, the program did very well with my far from state of the art 300Mhz PII and 48x CDROM. While the entire program can be loaded on the hard disk, performance using the CD was more than acceptable.
No one program will ever do it all, but DS2000 comes awfully close. And at less than 50 bucks for a CD copy (even less for a download), the price is terrifically attractive-it's less than half what's charged for most of its competitors. There is certainly no reason that a cash-strapped young amateur couldn't be happy with this program for all her observing needs. I know I've used this single application more than any other astronomy app on my computer over the last 5 months. My hat's off to Steve Tuma. He had a new and different idea for a deep sky program, and his professionalism and persistence are paying off for us all with the release of DS2000!
|
| |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
