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RISC World

DiscWorld

Aaron Timbrell rounds up the software directory

It's back to normality for DiscWorld this issue, as we are once again including a full commercial product...

NightSky - worth £14.90

NightSky is a versatile and comprehensive astronomy package. It quickly and accurately draws starmaps for any place on earth and any date and time. The sun, moon and planets are included as well as the Milky Way and also selected deep sky objects - clusters, nebulae and galaxies.

A sample starmap

>A sample starmap. On the real thing you can zoom in to examine areas in detail.

  • Allows display of the NightSky at any time from anywhere on earth
  • Can show stars down to magnitude 7.55 (26104 stars)
  • You can specify faintest magnitude displayed controlling how many stars are shown
  • For each star the following information is given: Name; Right Ascension and
  • Declination; Magnitude; Distance; Absolute magnitude; Surface temperature; Luminosity and Spectral class
  • In addition each star can have text associated with it which is accessed via an icon
  • We supply text for the most interesting stars but you can edit this and add your own
  • Constellation boundaries can be shown and constellations can be 'joined up'
  • The Moon, Sun and planets can be shown
  • The map can be updated in real time or accelerated time
  • Lunar and solar eclipses can be observed. This demonstrates the accuracy of the program. NightSky shows that the solar eclipse of 11th August 1999 will be total at Falmouth but partial in Manchester - try this on other programs
  • Occultations can be predicted and watched
  • The star catalogue can be processed for dates between 20000BC and 20000AD
  • Proper motion is allowed for. This is not limited to the date range above
  • Deep sky objects can be shown e.g nebulae, clusters, galaxies etc

"An entertaining and educational program.. .. well worth buying"
Archimedes World

"Comparisons of NightSky with 'The Sky' which is available on PC:

  • The Sky requires 13.5Mb for Windows version - NightSky runs on a 2Mb machine.
  • The Sky with 10,000 stars costs twice the price of NightSky with 26,104 stars.

NightSky has set a standard which competitors will find hard to surpass. If you've got an Arc and even the smallest interest in the sky, buy this application; it's guaranteed to get you bitten by the astronomy bug. I have no real criticisms.... The keywords of this application are flexibility with accuracy..."
Risc User

"I particularly like the way you can specify a star simply by clicking on the constellation and then the Greek letter. One particularly nice feature is the ability to plot the path a planet would make through the sky over time. ..the functions that NightSky offers go much further than Orrery and let you produce more comprehensive results. Is NightSky worth the asking price ? Most definitely."
Acorn Computing

The complete DiscWorld line up

As per usual we have our collections of the latest RISC OS games and applications, as well as support files for this issues articles. So the full DiscWorld line up looks something like this:

Games

All the games from this issues games world column.

NightSky

The full version of NightSky for our lucky readers...

PD

All the latest PD, shareware and freeware releases from the PD column.

ToolBox

This contains two sets of Toolbox Modules. The Castle archive contains the latest 26/32 bit neutral system components, required if you want to run a lot of new software releases on 26bit machines (ie. anything that isn't an Iyonix). The RISCOS Ltd archive contains later and improved versions of a number of modules and is suitable for all versions of RISC OS from 3.1 onwards.

Aaron Timbrell

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