Starry Night Pro vs Stellarium

[EntropyStar]

Hi,

As an avid user of Stellarium I'm starting to notice the limitations of it and wondered if it's worth splashing out on Starry Night Pro? I'm mainly interested in transit times of various solar system moons and of course the GRS. I can find all this info on the internet easily enough but not in one place. So for those users who have Starry Night Pro what's the main difference between it and Stellarium, what's the incentive to pay for it etc? I have tried Cartes Du Ciel but didn't find the user interface particularly smooth and easy to use, so I dropped back to Stellarium as it's more convenient to navigate around in, Cartes Du Ciel seemed to look like it was from the 90's! Great information, terrible UI.

[MG1]

I can't see any text?

(I'm on tapatalk if that makes a difference?)

[Dave Dubya]

Hi,

As an avid user of Stellarium I'm starting to notice the limitations of it and wondered if it's worth splashing out on Starry Night Pro? I'm mainly interested in transit times of various solar system moons and of course the GRS. I can find all this info on the internet easily enough but not in one place. So for those users who have Starry Night Pro what's the main difference between it and Stellarium, what's the incentive to pay for it etc? I have tried Cartes Du Ciel but didn't find the user interface particularly smooth and easy to use, so I dropped back to Stellarium as it's more convenient to navigate around in, Cartes Du Ciel seemed to look like it was from the 90's! Great information, terrible UI.

Unless you were intending to get something more out of it, Starry Night Pro doesn't seem like it'd be worth getting just for transit times (I assume it's still ~£75)

Sites like this - Jupiter Great Red Spot (GRS) transits - give you most of the info.

Or if you've got a smartphone, there are apps that give transit times.

[Merlin66]

Stellarium is "eye candy"

Cartes du Ciel is a full blown sky mapping program.

That's the difference.

[EntropyStar]

Stellarium is "eye candy"

Cartes du Ciel is a full blown sky mapping program.

That's the difference.

I'm aware that's more indepth than Stellarium but if the information you require is available more quickly then it's silly to make it over complicated to extract it.

Maybe it's just the way I'm using Cartes Du Ciel but I find the UI experience terrible, yes it holds all the information and does everything i'd want it to but it's not particularly user friendly, there's no problem with updating products and making them quicker to use. Just silly little things like panning across the night sky means you have to manually drag sliders across (ie like viewing an oversized webpage), this isn't the 90's anymore!! I can use Cartes Du Ciel easily enough, I just choose not to use it.

Anyway the conversation was about Starry Night Pro....what's the incentive to buy it etc, what's good about it.

[Merlin66]

CdC shows the satellites of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus....I thought that was at least a significant part of what you were looking for.....

[Daggerstab]

You can try KStars. Like Stellarium, it's free in both senses of the word. It's a Linux application, but it's also available for Windows through the KDE for Windows Initiative:

http://windows.kde.org/

http://edu.kde.org/kstars/

It has a lot of information that Stellarium doesn't, but its interface is more user-friendly than Skychart/Cartes du Ciel.