For whatever its worth I have finally decided on SkyMap Pro 7:
http://www.skymap.com/index.htm

I demo'd Starry Night Backyard ( free internet download), TheSky 5 (129 plus
shipping), Starry Night Pro (129 plus shipping) and Guide 7 (89 plus shipp)
and SkyMap Pro 7 (94 plus shipp). Spent easily 100 hours with these 5
programs. Wanted to demo Cartes du Ciel which is free and ECU but I ran out
of stamina and I was becoming so confused by the different interfaces that I
was starting to go nuts. All these programs come with 30 day money back
guarantees. I am sending all of them back except SkyMap.

Bottom line is all the programs are very good. I am a full time computer
user and stare at a screen all day every day since early 1980's. A logical
interface is critical to me. SkyMap is so good there is no comparison as to
ease of use and logical command layout. SNP is the worst and to me very
confusing and unnecessarily complex. Sky and Guide are good. But for the
simple task of learning the sky and finding and planning what you want to
look at SkyMap wins hands down.

Guide is unsurpassed in sheer accuracy and quality and completeness of data.
But all the rest are very accurate too. Sky is useless on double stars; a
defect they acknowledge and intend to correct in the next version.

SNB is real good. SNP is more powerful and complete but too confusing. I
have no doubt it will do whatever you want after you memorize how to run it.
But it aint intuitive and it has massively annoying floating toolbars that
cannot be docked, resized or customized. The major advantage of SNP is its
solar system animations. These are terrific and I regard them as very
important to learning how the solar system works. Plus you can use these
features to get kids interested. Very impressive. Skys animations are very
good also. Guide and SkyMap do not have any solar system animations but
they do show moons going around Jupiter Saturn etc.

All the programs allow you to go back and forward in time. Skymap makes you
manually click each time increment whereas all the others let you play time
like a movie.

SkyMap finds conjunctions, oppositions, eclipses etc and produces ephemeris
lists with great ease. Sky does a neat job of finding conjunctions using
the solar system animation too. In addition SkyMap lets you find the
date/time when objects are closest/farthest to/from earth. None of the
others did this as far as I could determine.

I dont have a laptop or any kind of imager hence could not test telescope
control or camera related functions. All the programs indicate scope
control features and I understand that Sky is required to run SBIG imagers.

I have used many many programs and I am very hard to please when it comes to
software. Only a very few are truly brilliant; like Excel, Quicken and a
few others. SkyMap is brilliant software; short on fancy animations but it
displays everything in the sky accurately and lets you find and see what you
want with ease.

Keep in mind that computer software preferences are very personal and your
opinions may differ. Luckily you can't go wrong with any of these programs
and I think they are well worth the modest price.

Regards

Bill Wood
LX200 10" f/10
Phoenix, AZ

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