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All Other: XEphem by CSI, Inc.
Brand | All Other |
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Availability | available |
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Reviews
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Mar 25, 2008
A marvelous piece of astronomical software!
Pros:Scientific Quality; Highly Accurate; Runs on many platforms
Cons:Take a little effort to get used to it
Comments:XEphem 3.7.3 is the latest release of a marvelous piece of scientific grade software. It does many things, and does them quite well. First of all, it is a highly accurate ephemeris generator. But it also generates highly detailed sky charts, maps of the Moon and planets, orbits of the HST, and many others. Here is a partial list of some of its features:
Bottom Line: Would you recommend this item? Yes
* Computes heliocentric, geocentric and topocentric information for all objects;
* Has built-in support for all planets; the moons of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Earth;
* Central meridian longitude of Mars and Jupiter; Saturn's rings; and Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
* Allows user-defined objects including stars, deepsky objects, asteroids, comets and Earth satellites.
* Offers many large databases including Tycho, Hipparcos, GSC, USNO.
* Graphically displays a 24 hour period showing when any selected objects are up;
* Displays 3-D stereo views of the Solar System that are particularly well suited for visualizing comet trajectories;
* Sorts and prints all catalogs with very flexible criteria for creating custom observing lists;
* Downloads current asteroid and comets lists from Lowell and MPC;
* Downloads timely Earth satellite orbital TLE parameters;
* Downloads Digitized Sky Survey FITS files from STScI or ESO;
* Displays seti@home client progress and plots position being processed on Sky View map.
* It’s FREE.
It is available for many platforms, but not as a native Windows application. It was written to exploit the power of Unix, Linux, and similar systems. This means it will also run on MAC OS/X. In order for it to run on Windows, an emulator must be used. So in order to realize its full potential, it should be run on an X-based system. Following are the available platforms as listed by the author of the software:
* Linux
* FreeBSD
* MacOS/X, PPC and Intel
* Solaris
* AIX
* HP-UX
* OpenVMS
* Can also be used under MS Windows using VMWare, MKS Toolkit or Cygwin.
It does take a good bit of getting used to, as it does not do things quite the way the general "Windows" applications tend to do. But once you learn the secrets of its use, it is far more powerful.
Probably its greatest strength is its ability to use data from many different sources available on the web for free. It will even go and grab Hubble Guide Star Catalog stars, as needed, from the web if you have a high-speed connection.
Rather that go further in a detailed in depth look at this software (it would take many pages), I would advise the potential user to look at the software's website located at: http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/
Also, a very good review was done on an older release of XEphem and is located on CloudyNights at: http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=371
This is truly a great piece of software for those that want a little more than the normal "sky map" software out there. It is a tool that is well worth becoming familiar with and learning its capabilities. And it is a "must have" if you're already running a Unix or Linux like system.Sort by