Astroplanner

Astroplanner is an observation planning and logging application for Mac and Windows. It offers a tremendous amount of power and utility for a small price: the "basic" download, which includes the Messier, NGC and Yale Bright Star catalogues, is completely free; $20 buys you registration (free upgrade to future versions, etc) and download of the entire (very extensive) list of catalogues, with the exception of the 550MB Hubble Guide Star Catalogue; $35 will net you a CD-ROM will all catalogues, the Hubble GSC included.

This application may look somewhat bare-bones compared to its bigger cousins on the Windows platform, Steven Tuma's Deepsky Astronomy Software and Greg Crinklaw's SkyTools 2; however, it is a deep application with lots of nice features under the hood. For example, just yesterday I unearthed Astroplanner's fine variable star observing and logging features. I know there are more features galore just out of my fingertips' immediate reach ... consider the fact that Astroplanner's manual is a whopping 241 pages (if one ncludes the Addendum that brings things up to the current 1.4.3 release, it is more like 300 pages). This is over twice the size of the manuals for Deepsky Astronomy Software and SkyTools.

The main thing that visibly separates Astroplanner from its siblings is its lack of full charting capabilities. Instead, what you get is a very feature-full Field of View screen, which can be configured and amplified in at least a dozen different ways. It could be said that Astroplanner very wisely concentrates solely on what it purports to be: an application for planning and logging ... it is NOT an atlas, nor does it pretend to be one. There are plenty of planetarium/cartography programs out there.

Author Paul Rodman is a friendly, active developer with an open ear for users' suggestions, bug reports and questions. There is a lively Yahoo! group for Astroplanner where Rodman can be found fielding emails from over 1,000 members. It will be very interesting to see where this application moves in future -- and make no mistake, it IS moving!

If you are a Mac user and need an observation planning / logging package, look no further. If you are a Windows user and need an observation planning / logging package, you may not need to look any further, either. Note, though, that the only "ding" in my review is that I have found Astroplanner to be a wee bit sluggish on Windows -- the Field of View screen, in particular, may take a few seconds to re-draw, especially if you have large stellar/DSO catalogues enabled. Paul Rodman acknowledges on the software's website that the Windows version is a "resource hog," and it is beginning to look as though support for Windows 98 is becoming a thing of the past. This is an application that was developed specifically for the Macintosh and then "ported" to Windows.

It's one of the biggest astro software bargains I know. Please check out Astroplanner.

Added:  Thursday, February 10, 2005
Reviewer:  Glenn Becker
Score:
Related Link:  Astroplanner
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