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Redshift 4 was able to do this but not with such grace and ease. I guess Io was hiding behind the planet at the time. The real gem, however, is being able to roll the mouse wheel to zoom in on your subject, and in this instance Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are all there, labeled and moving with Jupiter as the application animates the movement of the sky in real-time. Just pull up the search window, type in ‘Jupiter’ and the animated screen will move so that Jupiter is centred on the screen. One useful benchmark test I ran was to identify Jupiter and view its moons. I downloaded and ran Cartes Du Ciel as a comparison and found myself stumbling on every mouse click, despite it being a more powerful package. In fact the key to Stellarium is that it is extremely intuitive. The two main menus are simple roll-overs on the bottom and left of the screen and are pretty self-explanatory.

I could even put in a panorama of the ocean, making me feel more at home! This has an instant appeal but I was delighted to find that I could change this image to a number of different vistas from snowy forests to the moon. Upon opening Stellarium one is presented with a 360 degree panoramic view of a field, with the points of the compass on the horizon. Stellarium, on the other hand, is not only intuitive and modern, but has a comfortable, warm feel to it as well. However the interface looks more at home on a ZX Spectrum, such is the dated format of the application. Cartes Du Ciel is Open Source and actually boasts a number of features that Stellarium doesn’t have. The two that frequently came out in search results were Cartes Du Ciel and Stellarium.

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There is a comprehensive list of free astronomy packages here, for both Mac and PC. Liz and I are able to see Jupiter’ moons using our bins, for example, and an astronomy application can help visualise what to look for. That said the software can be used to help identify stars, planets and moons that are visible using a pair of binoculars, and since every boat owner has at least one pair of bins on board having a fairly sophisticated level of information is useful. Of course there are billions of stars but the average human eye can only see around 3,500 at any one time, so there is a lot of data I don’t require. All I am interested in, and I suspect all most amateur star-gazers are interested in, is identifying what the stars are above our heads that we can see with our own eyes. There is much of deep-space that I don’t need to know about either and I don’t need an animated history of the universe, even if it is educational. As long as I live on the water I’m never going to own a telescope, so I don’t need my app to talk to and move said telescope. Redshift 7 and Starry Night are quite sophisticated but as a boat-owner with just a passing interest in astronomy there are many features I don’t need in an astronomy application. For the record the most popular paid-for astronomy apps are Redshift 7 and Starry Night, but I was interested in finding a free astronomy package with similar features to the ones I was used to. Redshift 7 is the latest incarnation but it cost a few dollars to purchase. Computers and the technology used to run them have moved on since then and now that we use a 10 inch netbook as our primary computer I can no longer run Redshift 4 on a small screen resolution. My copy of Redshift 4 was old, bought off Amazon second hand many years ago. In this brief post I look at a free astronomy app called Stellarium, which is ideal for anyone with just a small interest in the stars. Having this kind of information at one’s fingertips is a great way of understanding the constellations of the sky and a useful way of passing night watches. With our lon and lat programmed into the computer’s system and the laptop pointing towards the same aspect as the boat’s bow we were able to quickly learn the stars above.

Liz and I would position the old Acer laptop upon the table and boot up Redshift, an astronomy package that allowed us to view the sky at night. Many an evening would be spent sitting in the cockpit at night, enveloped by the surround sound of cicadas and gently lapping water. I have fond memories of our first summer at anchor in Turkey.

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