Astronomy Hacks

Astronomy Software in the Palm of Your Hand

Using the shareware Planetarium application for the Palm, you can keep your astronomy software right where you need it.

One of the fundamental problems for all amateur astronomers, especially beginners, is finding objects in the night sky. The sky is huge, and the field of view through a telescope eyepiece is extraordinarily small, so the likelihood of finding any specific deep-sky object without some specific observing aid is very low. One solution to this problem is a computerized GOTO scope, which has become an increasingly popular option for people who want to spend less time finding objects and more time looking at them. But many people also enjoy the challenge of finding objects manually. Indeed, my teenage son enjoys the “thrill of the hunt” even more than viewing the objects themselves. For finding objects on your own, you must have accurate maps of the night sky. Books and atlases like Sky Atlas 2000.0 and Uranometria are wonderful resources, but they don’t provide a real-time picture of the night sky: you have to contort the page at various angles to match the appearance of the stars. And while large atlases are nice to use on a table, they are not very convenient to hold at the eyepiece. Alternatively, you can print out detailed current star maps from astronomy software. But that can be cumbersome and limited to specific areas that you choose in advance. What if you change your mind and want to look at a different area? Or ...