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Planetarium is an application for the Palm Connected Organizer that plots star charts and offers some unique, useful features for the beginning star gazer as well as for the professional astronomer.
It calculates the position of the sun, the moon, the planets, up to 9000 stars, hundreds of deep sky objects, comets and asteroids for any time and any geographical position and draws a sky map of any section of the sky with all 88 constellations. Stargazers can use it to help them find or identify objects in a clear night-time sky.
You can calculate twilight times, moon phases, and various astronomical information like coordinates, magnitude, distance, rise and set times and much more of the planets and all the other objects in the sky.
The useful time-increment function makes the program very interactive. You can use the Palm computers hardware buttons to advance forward or backward in time stepwise. The time intervals are carefully chosen so that you can, for example, follow the annual path of a planet among the stars, including retrograde motion and conjunctions.
You can also use Planetarium as a compass when the sun or moon is visible. Line up the sun symbol in the compass display with the sun in the sky and your Palm shows you where north is.
Planetarium can also be used with a Telescope. Just tap an object on the star map and read off its Az/Alt or RA/Dec coordinates to set on the compass rings of your telescope. It is even simpler if you have a computerized Telescope that you can connect via the serial port of the Palm. |
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