“Sailing along, on Moonlight Bay” Here’s a new look at the Hubble Space Telescope over the western coast of Australia on November 11, 2000, at 3:18;00 UTC. This image was made with Starry Night Pro 3.1, and it uses my new HST photo, which you can download. The HST photo is adapted from one in the NASA pictorial archives. (Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Light Pollution (Revised 1/8/2001) One of the inevitable by-products of civilization is light pollution; the more we want to see what we’re doing at night, the brighter our cities and towns become. This image shows the Western hemisphere as viewed from the Moon at 12:00 midnight (UTC), January 2-3, 2001. That’s a lot of light, and it makes a pretty picture! But that brightness, so beautiful and so important (so that we won’t stumble over the cat or the dog), is also a problem: It diminishes the ability of astronomers to see what is in the sky. (Click on the picture for a larger view.) This image is a composite, made by capturing two separate Starry Night images: A normal image, using my own planet surface map, showing day and night, with clouds An image using a modified copy of a recent “twilight” surface map taken from the Web, with day/night turned off to show the nighttime lights; clouds used to mask lights so they show only where there is no cloud cover

Starry Night Gallery
The Sun’s new baby: artist’s conception of Asteroid (plutino) 2000 EB173, October 28, 2000	The International Space Station, “Alpha,” as of October 2000	Phobos & Deimos from 442 km above Mars, 2:00:00 UTC, May 20, 2000. FOV 30’.
Apollo 11 Lunar Ascent Module and sky, from Command Module (LM and moon surface from NASA photo)	Space Station One, from 2000: A Space Odyssey, over the coast of Africa November 5, 2000, 5:10:00 UTC	The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, 18:00:00 UTC, November 13, 2000, 4X binoculars
The RMS Titanic and the sky five minutes before the ship struck the iceberg (image credits)	Saturn, from 167 km above its satellite Mimas, at 14:00 UTC, November 1, 2000	Ptolemy’s Rosette: A thing of beauty (Click for explanation)

Starry Night is fun, but it’s also a serious astronomy tool. The Pro version can drive any of several different telescopes. Its "LiveSky" feature allows you to attach documents, images, and even Web sites to any celestial object. And it’s being used by SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Starry Night Beginner knows about 100,000 objects. Starry Night Backyard ups the ante to over a million objects, and Starry Night Pro’s database contains a catalog of 70,000 galaxies as well as the complete Messier, NGC/IC, SAO, Hipparcos/Tycho and Hubble catalogs. (Yes, all 19 million Hubble objects!) With Starry Night Pro, you can download deep-sky images directly from the Digitized Sky Survey into Starry Night. You can also download and add specialized databases, such as one containing the stars with known planets. ’Nuff said? To learn much more about Starry Night, visit SPACE.com. There are other sites on the World Wide Web where you can view Starry Night images; just search for "Starry Night". There’s even a site where you can download add-ons for Starry Night.

	Maps of the Solar System. This is where I found many of the planetary surface images I use with Starry Night. Excellent site, with links to sites containing other images.
	Revised surface maps of Earth with atmosphere and without atmosphere for Starry Night. Revised 1/8/2001, better cloud mapping and improved color realism! Both maps are now 2048x1024 pixels in size. To work around a bug in Starry Night, you might need to rename these images to Earth_atmos.pct and Earth.pct.
	Starry Night, by Bill Arnett. Add-ons for Starry Night, including databases of selected objects (such as the galaxies in the Local Group or Dr. David Green’s Galactic Supernova Remnant catalog). Bill also maintains an excellent site full of astronomical information.
	LiveSky, the companion site for Starry Night, by SPACE.com Canada. A good site with a great deal of astronomical information and links to more. The Starry Night programs have a direct link to this site; bring up the info window for an object, and click to go to LiveSky for more.
	Amateur Astronomy, by John Rummel. A nice compact hobbyist’s site, with some good articles and some of John’s own photos of deep-sky objects. You might recognize his starry background; he’s using my image.
	My spacecraft images for Starry Night. I have several sets available, with five spacecraft in each set. NEW! Set 4 ncludes the latest ISS (“Alpha”) configuration as of 10/2000!
	Astronomy isn’t my only hobby. I also collect, repair and sell fountain pens.

Thank you for visiting! Feel free to send me your comments. DISCLAIMER: I have no affiliation with SPACE.com Canada. I’m just an enthusiastic owner of Starry Night Pro and Starry Night Backyard. Last updated January 11, 2001. This page and all images used herein, except product badges, are © 2000 by Richard F. Binder .