What is Planetarium?
Planetarium
is an application for the Palm Connected Organizer
that plots star charts and offers some unique, useful features for the
beginning star gazer as well as for the professional astronomer.
It
calculates the position of the sun, the moon, the planets, up to 9000 stars,
hundreds of deep sky objects, comets and asteroids for any time and any
geographical position and draws a sky map of any section of the sky with
all 88 constellations. Stargazers can use it to help them find or identify
objects in a clear night-time sky.
You can calculate twilight times, moon
phases, and various astronomical information like coordinates, magnitude,
distance, rise and set times and much more of the planets and all the other
objects in the sky.
The
useful time-increment function makes the program very interactive. You
can use the Palm computer's hardware buttons to advance forward or backward
in time stepwise. The time intervals are carefully chosen so that you can,
for example, follow the annual path of a planet among the stars, including
retrograde motion and conjunctions.
You can also use Planetarium as a compass
when the sun or moon is visible. Line up the sun symbol in the compass
display with the sun in the sky and your Palm shows you where north is.
Planetarium can also be used with a
Telescope. Just tap an object on the star map and read off its Az/Alt or
RA/Dec coordinates to set on the compass rings of your telescope. It is
even simpler if you have a computerized Telescope that you can connect
via the serial port of the Palm.
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