Star Charts On The Cheap Page 3-
I stumbled upon this website while looking up material specifically for this article. Star Charts R Us is based upon the Night Vision Java planetarium program. The first time user is greeted to an incredibly simple interface -
It's that simple. Or is it? In fact, while it looks simple, you have a lot of options with it. For our little test, I chose a star, my favorite, Albireo, from the list of stars. When I clicked the "Create chart" button, it gave me a basic star chart with Albireo centered... but not labeled. I've circled it here in red.
In my haste, I failed to click on the "Star names" radio button.
That corrected, I proceeded to play with the interface a little more. In many ways, this is like a hybrid between Heavens-Above and Your Sky, only much simpler. For instance, there is no option for setting your location. Also, the charts it produces are very straightforward; you want to find Jupiter? It can tell you where it is...
...and produce a chart...
...but only for the time the chart was created. In other words, there is no way to produce charts for a specific time. This isn't that big a deal for most, but keep in mind that planets move; they do not stay in the same place night to night. Constellations, on the other hand, only appear to change their location with the Earth's movement in space (the stars themselves are moving through space as well, but that, of course, is only noticeable over thousands of years). For this test, I chose Delphinus.
If you choose a white background, say for printing purposes, the image looks like this...
Final Thoughts on Star Charts R Us
While this might not be the best to use for printing purposes, it does produce some nice, clear color charts that are very accurate. It is not meant to be a serious astronomy application but should be thought of more as a learning tool that you can use to learn more of the night sky. However, the Java based application that this site uses as its basis, Night Vision, is a very flexible tool that will run on a number of different systems and shouldn't be overlooked. Think of Star Charts R Us as an introduction to the latter.
This page assembled with TextEdit on Macintosh OS X version 10.4.6... believe it or not.