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Welcome again to our monthly newsletter with features on exciting celestial events, product reviews, tips & tricks, and a monthly sky calendar. We hope you enjoy it!
Popular Science magazine aviation editor Eric Adams praises Starry Night® Version 6 in his round-up for CNN.com article “High-tech gadgets for stargazers” posted March 15, 2007:
Planetarium software is essential for both learning about the night sky and planning your observing sessions. What time will Mars rise? How do I find the Double Cluster? What do the orbits of all the planets look like when accelerated?
Starry Night's intuitive controls and beautiful visual presentation of the sky—complete with subtly highlighted constellation patterns and a detailed pretend landscape surrounding your chosen observing position—lets you instantly grasp where things are in the sky and how they change on an hourly, daily, and yearly basis.
There are lots of fun animations, too—you can watch, for example, the complete, accurately computed flight path of the Cassini probe to Saturn.
Watching that made me really understand, for the first time, how planetary probes reach, chase after, and maneuver around their targets—it's actually a very elegant little dance they do up there.
You can read the full article at CNN.com.
Linda Fung Marketing Director, Imaginova®
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Imaginova Corp., publisher of Starry Night® astronomy software, announces the successful launch of the Starry Night® Widget, a small web application that delivers the stars and planets visible from any location on Earth directly to your desktop.
The Starry Night® Widget for Mac OS® X Dashboard rocketed to #1 of Apple’s Dashboard downloads on its first day. It remains in the Top 5, delivering over 2 million sky images daily to users worldwide.
“The Starry Night® Widget is a showcase of Starry Night®’s new web-delivery capabilities,” said Seth Meyers, Vice President and General Manager, Imaginova Studios. “The success of the Widget indicates the demand for science-related content. The Starry Night® Server, which supplies the sky images for the Widget, can be configured to serve a wide variety of desktop and handheld platforms.”
Users of the Starry Night® Widget set their location by ZIP/postal code or by latitude and longitude, and the Widget flips to show a view of the current sky. They can customize their view to show constellations, the horizon, the ecliptic line and labels for the celestial sights above. The Starry Night® Server delivers a new sky image every few minutes.
The Starry Night® Server also powers Starry Night® Online, the highly interactive planetarium applet that can be found at www.space.com/nightsky/. Starry Night® Online allows users to see the stars and planets from any location on Earth for any time in the past, present or future. Starry Night® Online is only a sampling of the stunning simulations and 3-D renderings that the full line of Starry Night®’s award-winning desktop software has to offer.
The Starry Night® Widget can be downloaded for free from StarryNight.com or Apple.com.
Linda Fung Marketing Director, Imaginova®
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Starry Night® Middle and High School SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Ready
Starry Night® Middle School and High School have recently been accredited by Smart Technologies Inc. at the “SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Ready” level.
Accreditation at the “Ready” level means that SMART Technologies finds Starry Night® easy-to-use, intuitive and interactive.
All the keyboard controls can be implemented with the SMART Board software on-screen keyboard, and the interface buttons and text are of sufficient size to be easily activated on a SMART Board interactive whiteboard.
If you have a SMART Board in your classroom, Starry Night® Middle School or High School will be a great addition to help you teach your space science unit.
The approved SMART Software Accreditation logo is a trademark of SMART Technologies Inc.
Starry Night® On The Road
55th Annual National Science Teachers Association National Conference March 29-31, 2007 St. Louis, MO Booth #490
Stop by for a preview of Starry Night® Elementary and a “Honk if Pluto’s a Planet” bumper sticker.
Attend any one of our 8 workshops!
Linda Fung Marketing Director, Imaginova®
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Are you looking for it, too? It’s that frustrating time of year again. As the Northern Hemisphere rolls away from winter we eagerly await signs of spring. For many, spring comes with returning robins bobbing along the ground in a spirited hunt for lunch. For others it’s spring flowers putting in a first appearance. But the most reliable sign of spring is not of the Earth, but of the sky. It is the stars of Leo.
Leo the lion is a prominent spring constellation. When I see Leo riding high in the southern sky before midnight (figure 1), I know that Earth has not stalled in its yearly orbit and we are not stuck in perpetual winter.
Figure 1. The constellation of Leo is a rich hunting ground for sky gazers with telescopes. This part of the sky is relatively poor in stars but rich in galaxies.
At night, we face away from the Sun. Our nighttime view changes through the year. As Earth orbits around the Sun our view sweeps through the yearly cycle of seasonal constellations. The solar system is tilted compared to the plane of the galaxy (figure 2), and this also affects what we see as we look out into the stars. During spring nights we face away from the rich star fields of our galaxy. The Milky Way hugs the western horizon and our view is up and out of the galaxy (figure 3). This gives us a clear view into the deeps of intergalactic space.
To read the rest of this article, click here.
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Messier Marathon is a term describing the attempt to find as many of the Messier objects as possible in a single night. A marathon held on Saturday, March 17, 2007 promised the prospect of observing all 110 objects in one night. Let's see how Jeff Barbour made out...
Messier Marathon: What Really Happened?
Messier's 'Year in a Night' has come and gone and now you're left wondering why you didn't find all 110 on your first outing. The reasons are simple. Sky conditions trump everything, and the spot you chose to observe from introduces its own peculiarities. But you're tough enough to handle the truth. Even if you'd been observing from the surface of the Moon, you might have missed a few.
But let's start with that Moon idea first, shall we?
On the Moon, there'd be no trees and foliage to block the horizon. You'd be able to sweep the scope all the way across that 180 degree vault of the heavens and nothing would make an obstacle of itself. But a clear horizon is possible on Earth too. There are seas, mountains, and deserts enough that you could find the wide open spaces needed for a Messier Marathon. How wide open was your site? Probably more foliage than you'd care for.
But the Earth, unlike the Moon has other complicating factors as well. The Moon is free of atmospheric gases. There's nothing floating above the lunar surface to absorb, scatter, or disturb light in any way. From the dark half of the Moon, your fully dilated and dark-adapted eyes could capture starlight as faint as magnitude 8! How's that for seeing?
I'll bet you weren't going that deep where you were observing from—regardless of the horizon. In fact if you could see overhead stars to magnitude 5.5 without trouble, you were blessed with some pretty fine conditions! And if you weren't? That's one very good reason why you fell a few shy of 110.
Theoretically, if you could see stars to magnitude 8 unaided, you could also see more than 60% of the Messiers without any instrumentation whatsoever. But first you'd have to know precisely where to look, and more importantly what to look for! Distinguishing 8th magnitude anything's from stars might be a bit much to ask from those 1x7 binoculars you were born with. Besides, you'd need astronomical binoculars anyway if only to make out the other 40%. Meanwhile, a little extra magnification comes in useful when distinguishing stars from star clusters.
Bottom line: Seeing isn't finding, and sometimes finding isn't seeing!
To read the rest of this article, click here.
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Crater is a dim constellation that glides across the southern horizon at this time of year. It lies to the west of Corvus, above Hydra, and below the boundary between Virgo and Leo.
Three faint galaxies are worth bagging and comparing...
- NGC 3511 is a magnitude 11.5 spiral galaxy, seen somewhat edge-on;
- NGC 3887 is a magnitude 11.3 barred spiral, seen face on. Try a high magnification of 160x or 200x;
- NGC 3981 is a magnitude 12 spiral galaxy.
Lastly, γ Crateris is a pretty 4th magnitude fixed binary star that should be fairly easy to "split" in your telescope.
Sean O'Dwyer Starry Night® Times Editor
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Orion Rising over Lynn Mountain near Elizabethton, TN taken by Larry Souders. Shot with a Canon EOS 1D Mark IIn 400 ISO 30 seconds at f 3.5.
PRIZES AND RULES:
We would like to invite all Starry Night® users to send their quality astronomy photographs to be considered for use in our monthly newsletter.
- Featured submissions (best of month) will receive a prize of $75 USD.
Please read the following guidelines and see the submission e-mail address below.
- Format: Digital images in either JPG, GIF or TIFF format.
- Size: 700 pixels wide maximum.
- File size should be less than 2 MB.
- Include a caption: Your full name, location where photo was taken and any interesting details regarding your photo or how you took it. Please be brief.
- Important notes: We may edit captions for clarity and brevity. We reserve the right to not use submissions. In submitting your image or images to Imaginova®, you agree to allow us to publish them in all media—on the Web or otherwise—now and in the future. We'll credit you, of course. Most important, you'll have the satisfaction of sharing your experience with the world!
- Send images, following the above guidelines, to photo@starrynight.com (by sending an image you agree to the above terms, including Imaginova®’s right to publish your photos). Please do not send .ZIP files as they will not reach us.
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See the sky (planets, constellations) for any location on Earth.
Set your location by ZIP/postal code or by latitude and longitude, and the widget flips to show a view of the current sky.
With a touch of a button, see the sky from all directions.
It’s easy to customize your view. Choose to show constellations, the horizon, the ecliptic line, and labels for the celestial sights above.
The widget refreshes your sky image every few minutes so you are always looking at something new.
Whether at home or at work, keep Starry Night® astronomy software at your fingertips. Download Now!
Pedro Braganca Content Director, Starry Night®
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A guided video tour of celestial events visible in April 2007.
• Click Here to Download
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Daylight Saving Time
When you start up Starry Night®, the program checks your computer's date/time settings to find out if Daylight Saving Time is in effect for the current date, and if so, automatically adjusts the sky to account for this. If Daylight Saving Time is "on" in Starry Night®, the little icon of the sun immediately to the left of the time in the Toolbar will be colored yellow. Click on this icon to turn off Daylight Saving Time (if Daylight Savings Time is already on, clicking this icon will turn it off). Note that Starry Night® only checks to see if Daylight Saving Time is in effect when you open the program.
Pedro Braganca Content Director, Starry Night®
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Moon Phases
Full Moon: April 2 1:15 p.m.
Last Quarter: April 10 2:04 p.m.
New Moon: April 17 7:36 a.m.
First Quarter: April 24 2:36 a.m.
Observing Highlights
Monday, April 2 Full Moon, 1:15 p.m. To the Lakotah Sioux, this was the "Moon of Grass Appearing" on the plains. To the Natchez it was the "Strawberries" Moon, and in the Taos Pueblo, "Ashes Moon." This year, the fourth Full Moon happens to occur when the Moon is farthest from Earth in its orbit (apogee), so it will appear slightly smaller than other full moons in the year.
Tuesday, April 3 Lunar Apogee The Moon's distance from Earth varies a bit during its orbit. The point of farthest recession is called "apogee." Although this varies slightly from orbit to orbit, this time it is about 406,329 km or 252,481 miles. The time of closest approach is "perigee." See 4/17 below.
Tuesday, April 3 Moon-Spica, pre-dawn The just-past Full Moon passes near the bright star Spica in Virgo in the southwest sky.
Saturday, April 7 Moon-Antares, pre-dawn The Moon passes near the bright star Antares in Scorpius this morning, with brighter Jupiter nearby. Look to the southern heavens before dawn. There is an occultation (eclipse of the star by the Moon) visible in some places in the Southern Hemisphere, but not from North America or Europe.
To read the rest of this article, click hereAll times shown are U.S. Eastern Time. Data for this calendar has been derived from a number of sources including the Observer’s Handbook 2007.
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Join the Starry Night® Affiliate Program
If you publish a space or astronomy Web site or blog, earn extra cash by promoting Starry Night® on your Web site.
Click here to learn more!
It's easy to join and it's free!
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Send us your feedback
Do you have a question, comment, suggestion or article idea to pass along to Starry Night® Times?
Click here to get in touch with us.
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Starry Night® is the world's leading line of astronomy software and DVDs. Visit starrynight.com to see all the great products we offer for everyone from novice to experienced astronomers.
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