STAR PERFORMER

• Yale Bright Star (YBS) Catalogue of 9110 stars.

• Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) Catalogue of over 250,000 stars.

• Messier's Catalogue of 110 deep sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, and clusters).

• Sky & Telescope's NGC 2000.0 Catalogue of 13,226 deep sky objects.

• Tom Lorenzin's 1000+ database of observing comments for over 2000 objects.

• Jost Jahn's comet database containing 2298 cometary orbits.

• Jost Jahn's minor planet database containing orbital for thousands of asteroids.

• Ted Molczan's & T. S. Kelso's orbital information for approx. 900 Earth-orbiting satellites.

USING THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE

1. INPUT YOUR DETAILS Select your location, the time and optionally your altitude and local barimetric pressure. The more accurately you can define your location, the more accurate the results will be: normally getting close to one of the 1000 example cities is good enough.
2. CHOOSE YOUR BODY Select the object you are interested in observing. You can either look around to find something of interest, or search by name for the heavenly body of your choice.	3. ZOOM IN CLOSER When looking at planets or the moon, it pays to zoom in for a closer look. Most of the planets are shown in a shaded form like this: accurately representing what you would see through a telescope.
4. CLICK FOR INFORMATION You can click on each object to discover what is stored in the vast hypertext reference book. The more important bodies have plenty of background information and links to other pages.	5. LEARN! Some of the hypertext pages have associated images which you can launch by clicking on the link. Some pages even have links to audio files, so you can listen to Neil Armstrong as he steps onto the lunar surface.

RATINGS AND VERDICT