SkyView Version 1.00 (Monday, 8 February 1993)
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Introduction
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SkyView performs many of the functions of a planetarium. It allows you to
see the appearance of the sky from any specified location on the earth. You
can change the date and time for which the sky is displayed to see the sky
as it looked in the past or as it will look in the future.

SkyView displays the positions of the sun, moon, and all naked-eye planets,
as well as all the stars down to a limiting magnitude you select. You can
orient the sky display so that the North, South, East, or West horizon is
positioned at the bottom of the screen. The ecliptic, celestial equator,
galactic equator, and equatorial coordinate lines can be added to the
display in any combination. You even have control of the colors used for
most of the sky objects and for the background.

SkyView is a valuable tool for interactively exploring the fundamentals of
astronomy or for planning your observation time.

How much does SkyView cost? Absolutely nothing! SkyView is *free* software.
I wrote the Windows version of SkyView entirely for fun, for my own use,
and to learn more about and practice programming Windows.

As with any software, bugs are expected, as are opportunities for
improvement. Please see "Contacting the Author" below for information on
how to report bugs and suggest improvements.


Requirements
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SkyView requires Windows 3.1 to run. It may also work just fine with
Windows 3.0, but I don't know anybody still running 3.0 so I can't claim to
know it will work.

A math coprocessor is not required, but without one generating the sky
display will take significantly longer than if a coprocessor is present.

SkyView requires at least a 256-color video mode to work properly. It is
simply impossible to display the stars in different colors and intensities
of white as well as the planets in unique colors if only 16 colors are
available. Dithered colors are unacceptable when the area being colored is
small, as is the case with the symbols used to represent the planets.


Installation
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To install SkyView, follow these steps:

1.  Create a directory on your hard drive (assumed here to be the c drive)
    with whatever name you desire.

    c> md skyview

2.  Copy the zipfile to the directory you just created.

    c> copy a:\skyview.zip c:\skyview

3.  Change to the directory you just created and unzip the zipfile. The
    zipfile was created using PKZIP Version 2.04e.

    c> cd skyview
    c> pkunzip skyview.zip

4.  In Windows add the executable file skyview.exe to a group of your
    choice. If you have the wonderful Norton Desktop for Windows, you can
    simply drag the file skyview.exe to a group or directly to the desktop.

More information about this application and its use is accessible in
SkyView by selecting the Contents item on the Help menu.


Copyright
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Copyright (C) 1993 Stephen Michael Schimpf. All Rights Reserved.

Permission is granted to any individual or institution to use, copy, or
distribute this software, provided all of the original files are included
unmodified and that it is not sold for profit.


Contacting the Author
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If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for improvements, you
can contact me by USPS or Internet mail using the following addresses:

Stephen Michael Schimpf
2444 West 230th Street
Torrance, CA 90501-5242

Stephen Michael Schimpf, Programmer/Analyst II
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Astronomy
8979 Math Sciences Building
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1562

stephen@eggneb.astro.ucla.edu