Starry Night Pro

[ultramol]

Could anyone tell me if you can run a telescope from starry night pro with an astroeq control box and an eq5 mount. I currently use carte de ciel with my astroeq and although I find it ok I would like the better graphics of SNP. Thanks in advance.........Geoff

[damnut]

If you can accurately control your mount with cdc then the graphics should not matter. I checked and could not say conclusively that it would run your scope.

https://support.simulationcurriculum.com/entries/20428598-What-telescopes-can-I-control-with-Starry-Night-Pro-Pro-Plus-

http://www.starrynight.com/cgi-bin/faq/faq.cgi?file=pro-telescopes&toc=pro

http://www.siennasoft.com/en/pro-telescopes.shtml

[ultramol]

Thank you Damian, I appreciate your help

[JayStar]

Seriously don't get fooled by the graphics of SNP.  I know they are nice and I giot suckered into buying it for the nice graphics - stupid on my part.  The software is truly awful in my opinion.  It freezes and crashes regularly.   I run TheSkyX Pro and Maxim DL Pro side by side with no issues in terms of PC resources but loading SNP on its own just causes havoc.  Slow, unstable, then crashes with no shut down except through killing the process in Windows control panel. SNP is basically a shiny toy - has teh feeling of surfing a website as opposed to a serious piece of software.  It fails at the core requirement of simply giving a clear representation of the night sky and enabling simple and easy telescope control. 

Save yourself some money and stick with CDC - its a great program.  IF you want to get something a bit more polished but still has all the fundamentals in place for a planetarium then I would recommend TheSkyX.

Obviously these are just my opinions - I am sure there are people who love SNP

[Physopto]

Seriously don't get fooled by the graphics of SNP.  I know they are nice and I giot suckered into buying it for the nice graphics - stupid on my part.  The software is truly awful in my opinion.  It freezes and crashes regularly.   I run TheSkyX Pro and Maxim DL Pro side by side with no issues in terms of PC resources but loading SNP on its own just causes havoc.  Slow, unstable, then crashes with no shut down except through killing the process in Windows control panel. SNP is basically a shiny toy - has teh feeling of surfing a website as opposed to a serious piece of software.  It fails at the core requirement of simply giving a clear representation of the night sky and enabling simple and easy telescope control. 

Save yourself some money and stick with CDC - its a great program.  IF you want to get something a bit more polished but still has all the fundamentals in place for a planetarium then I would recommend TheSkyX.

Obviously these are just my opinions - I am sure there are people who love SNP

Yes I agree completely with the above statement. I also bought SNP a few years ago (version 6) caused nothing but problems for me.

Derek

[greyhaven]

Starry Night Pro plus V7.2.0.454.... latest update.... I was one of the first buyers in April 2014. The program is still less than perfect, still crashes way too often and the program is not really what I would call geared for  use by observers. It is designed for use as a teaching aid so if you want to prepare lectures and video presentations you might find it worth while but for planning observing sessions or logging or simply   finding objects you'll be faced with many crashes if you do too many searches in one session.  I only paid about $100.00 US for it a year ago and even after 14 months of patches and updates and features added that were left out of the 7.0 version the program is still left wanting and I still feel I over paid for a still incomplete program. They have no idea what an observer needs in a program to use as an observing aid. I would not recommend Starry Night Pro Plus V7.2.0454 for use by an amateur astronomer intending to use it to help with his observations or equipment.

Grey