2/28/2023 0 Comments Skysafari plus vs proIn the summer of 2014 I was preparing for a two week posting as the resident astronomer at the Sossusvlei Desert Lodge in Namibia when a 45 th anniversary sale to mark the Apollo 11 moon landing was offered with 45% off each version. Sky Safari 4 running on my iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6 I found the app immediately accessible and intuitive to use, finding it particularly useful at outreach events to point out constellations, especially under London’s light polluted skies. SkySafari by Simulation Curriculum is available in three versions with increasing levels of detail and functionality though my first experience was with the entry level SkySafari 3 Basic which I grabbed during a sale event on iOS for free. This is readily apparent in the development of star chart apps for smart phones and tablets. Software that was once consigned to desktop computers and useful for planning a night’s observation, but perhaps less so in the field, can now, thanks to relentless march of technology, be delivered in ever more functional and user-friendly ways. While star charts with varying degrees of accuracy and detail have existed for centuries, planetarium software has been available for only a few decades. Despite using the even more detailed Uranometria 2000.0 at University, my personal preference remains Sky Atlas 2000, and for trips away, its little brother, the S&T Pocket Sky Atlas. However, as my skills improved, and apertures increased in size, the desire for more detail with higher limiting magnitudes saw a migration to Sky Atlas 2000 which plots stars to a magnitude of 8.5 and 2,700 deep sky objects. My first star charts were contained in the venerable Norton’s Star Atlas, which provided this budding astronomer with enough detail to star hop to any object of interest that was within the range of the 4.5” Newtonian. It is a technique I still favour today with six of my seven telescopes currently mounted on manual Alt-Az mounts, with only the Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS benefitting from computer aided pointing and tracking. However, that meant I learnt how to navigate around the sky using star charts and the less and less used technique of star-hopping. Thoughts of computerised Go-To were to be found in my wildest dreams and at the time only available on a few scopes with price tags that would have taken years to save for. Even a sidereal-rate clock drive was beyond the meagre means of money earned from a Christmas job. My first scope, a 4.5” Newtonian on a shaky, undersized equatorial mount had manual slow motion controls and that was it. Those same feelings apply to my passion for astronomy. I have a tendency for the “old school.” Perhaps fuelled by powerful nostalgia but I often find myself favouring the way things were to the way they are now.
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