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SkyChart III is an advanced planetarium program that accurately simulates and displays the sky as it appears in the present, or from thousands of years in the past or future. With SkyChart III you can view the sky from any place on Earth, from any object in the solar system, or even from thousands of light years beyond it.SkyChart III is also a telescope control program, supporting all of the leading computer-controlled telescopes available on the market today. SkyChart III lets you enjoy the benefits of computer-aided observing: see where the telescope is pointing on your computer screen, or slew the telescope to any object in the sky with a single click of the mouse.
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I just got a telescope to augment my binocular skywatching, and was looking for a program to help me locate interesting objects in the sky. Ideally it would have a decent built-in database, provide for database extensions, have flexible viewing options (including red "night vision"), and allow observation-logging.
I narrowed my choices down to Starry Night and SkyChart. Starry Night Pro is definitely the hands-down winner at the "high-end," providing all the features I'm looking for and many more. At $180, Pro was out of my range. Presumably that's why they created Starry Night Backyard, a stripped down version of pro, it is still a little expensive at $80.
Starry Night has fancier viewing options, and an admittedly nicer interface (heck, it won an Apple Award at the WWDC!), and really fancy features like "ride a comet view mode. However, for actual "at-the-scope" assistance of finding cool things in the sky, SkyChart is better than Starry Night, and it's much less expensive. SkyChart has a night-vision viewing mode, but Starry Night's is only in the Pro version. SkyChart lets you enter objects you've observed, but logging is only possible in Starry Night Pro's upcoming version.
So, if you're looking for a very nice interface and fancy movies, but not so much help at a telescope, Starry Night Backyard might be better for you. But if you just bought a telescope and want a program to help you learn your way around the sky, SkyChart seems to me to be the winner.
