Planetarium Program for Mac

Any good downloadable planetarium programs which can run on Mac System 10 or higher?

Do planetarium programs suffer from display on LCD screens vs. CRTs? I worry that my square LCD pixels may give me the appearance of square stars, all the same size.

Before upgrading my Mac I had an older copy of Starry Night Deluxe (about 5 years old). It won't run on the new machine. I liked it a lot.

Are there any Mac users who have new Starry Night versions, especially Enthusiast and Pro, who can comment, compare, contrast?

Thanks for the help,

Steve

Steve,

I'm running Starry Nights Pro, and find it excellent. Don't notice any severe pixelation on my old Powerbook G3, very nice graphics, and it runs very well on the 'ole 400Mhz machine. I recommend it!

Jerry Kuchera

I'm using Starry Nights Pro V. 4.0.5, but on a 2 year old G4 Power Mac and OS 10.3.5.

Cool program, would recommend for us Mac guys.

I have run both Starry Night Pro 4.5 and EquinoX (inexpensive native Mac OS X) programs on both an older iMac and an ibook. Both programs look the same on either LCD or CRT screens, IMHO. Starry Night lets you configure the size/brightness of the visible stars which is nice. EquinoX is really fast to load if you want to do a quick check of the sky for any given time/location though. Starry Night has a really huge database, but EquinoX comliments it well for what I use it for. Hope this helps.

XEphem runs great under X-Windows on a Mac (I use it on my iBook).

Pat

Steve,

I usually just use TheSky under Classic (it was bundled with an Orion scope). Sometimes I switch to MPJAstro (homepage.mac.com/microprojects), which has an unusually attractive interface. Under X-11, you can run XEphem, as somebody else has suggested. If you install the KDE desktop under X-11 (use the Fink package manager), there's a built-in planetarium program called KStars which is rather good.

The beauty of all of these is the price. They're free.

-- Tom