Review: Night Sky 3.2

Product Name: Night Sky 3.2
Company: Kaweah Software
URL: http://www.kaweah.com/NightSky/
Category: Planetarium
Price: Limited freeware mode, full version $25
Requirements: Power Macintosh G3 or G4, OS X, 5 MB HD Space
Rating: 1 bounce - Lustless

Night Sky 2 was one of the very first astronomical applications I ever downloaded. It was the mid-nineties, and at that time I had just bought a PowerBook 520 to write my PhD thesis with. As an alternative to actually getting some work done, I was browsing through the Info-Mac ftp archives looking for nifty programs to install on my new computer. Night Sky was one of the applications I found, downloaded and played with for a while. Like many Mac applications of its time it was a little bit playful as well as functional, with the sound of some sort of bird squawking when the application was launched, and a second, different, squawk on quitting.

Version 2 of Night Sky, though designed for 68k Macs, it works just fine in Classic.

Fast-forward eight years, and I come across Night Sky 3.2 for OS X. Was it really only a single generation up from the original I downloaded in 1995? Seemingly so, for though it had been updated and enhanced in many ways, it is still strikingly similar to the original. Just to get this in perspective, in eight years Microsoft Word has gone from version 5.1 to 6, 98, 2001 and finally to X, effectively four generations of releases. Through that time the system software has evolved from System 7.1 through System 7.5/7.6, System 8, System 8.5, System 9, and now three successive iterations of System X, 10.0, 10.1 and the current version Jaguar or System 10.2. Hardware changes have been even more dramatic: my current 1 GHz G4 PowerBook has ten times more memory, thirty times the disk space, and something like a hundred times the speed the PowerBook 520 I had back then.

What I'm trying to get across here is how much has changed. Of course the French maintain that "the more things change, the more they stay the same". I'm not so sure: can an application that that worked well in 1995 really make the grade in 2003?

User Interface & Performance

Downloading and installing Night Sky is easy. The manual comes as a PDF file, although this manual is surprisingly brief, with a number of features barely mentioned at all. Launching Night Sky is slow and cumbersome. The application takes so long to appear you'll think it has crashed. On a 1 GHz G4 PowerBook the application took well over a minute to appear, and nearer two minutes on a 500 MHz G3 iBook. The icon appears in the Dock almost at once, but after that nothing until finally a dialogue box appears waiting for the user to open a data file. This bit is strange too, very few OS X applications behave in such a way, except perhaps immediately after installation. The first time this happens with Night Sky you might imagine that this is part of the configuration process, and after doing this it will write to location of the data files it needs to its preference file, and thus skip this bit the next time. But it doesn't, and you have to find the data files each time you launch the application. For an application that would superficially seem simple enough for children to use (and certainly lacking the depth advanced astronomers are going to want), this step sits in the start-up process like an anti-tank mine. And it gets worse. Close a simulation and try to open a new one, and you get the same dialogue box asking for the data file again! Once up and running though, Night Sky is fairly sprightly, and the obstacles that the user is going to come across are not performance issues but related to an interface that is sometimes buggy but more often just plain bad.

Night Sky is primarily a menu bar driven application with only three floating palettes (namely right ascension, declination, and view angle sliders) and only one mouse button command usable at any one time (there are no mouse plus keyboard combinations or contextual menu items). Running along the top of the Night Sky simulation window is a Microsoft-like "button bar". This consists of little fields within which data such as time and viewing angle are stored. These fields can be edited directly, or using the up and down buttons alongside some of them. Either way, the screen redraws with each command in the same slow, non-continuous way as the sliders mentioned earlier. There were a few new annoyances as well. Firstly, the date field wouldn't allow me to change its contents at all, and neither did it respond to its up and down buttons. This would appear to be a bug, as the time field worked fine. I found that the only way to change the date was to use the "Time" menu item or keyboard command (Command-Option-T) and bring up the date and time window. This window commandeers the entire application, and you can either enter new time and date data or dismiss it, you can't use it and the rest of the application at the same time. Even more irritating was the time zone field. This has up and down arrows, that one would assume allow the user to change the time zone on the fly. They don't, instead bringing up another window that monopolizes the application. This lists a few time zones, GMT and five North American ones. You can't add any additional ones and so you're out of luck if you live in France, Australia, Japan or any other country outside these six time zones, or for that matter if you are British or American and need to use British Summer Time or Daylight Savings Time. Add the fact that the word "Cancel" doesn't even fit on the time zone window's button, and you have an example of incredibly bad design.

The awful time zone control screen.

The unresponsiveness of the sky simulation control fields (RA and declination, viewing angle and azimuth) appears to be deliberate. Trying to enter something into these fields brings up one of the four slider bars. The floating sliders are large and easy to use, but strangely the big arrows respond only to the number of times they are clicked and not how long they are held down. Each time the arrow is pressed down, the screen responds by redrawing and then when it is finished redrawing you can click the arrow again to repeat the process. In other words, clicking and holding them doesn't move the slider across continuously, so you can't for example use the view angle arrows to quickly zoom in and out. Similarly, drawing the slider across doesn't produce cause the simulation to be redrawn continuously; instead, the program waits until the slider is released and then the simulation is redrawn according to the new setting. What makes this all the more noticeable is that if you drag the simulation window's scroll bars, the simulation does move smoothly, implying that the application is able to redraw the simulation on the fly, but the sliders don't tap into this ability.

Manipulating the simulation is achieved primarily through the use of mouse clicks and sliders.

Sliders may be useful for making simulations feel more realistic by providing a natural way of orienting the field of view, but sliders aren't the particularly accurate and to centre the view on a specific region of sky or astronomical object, you are going to want to enter in the stellar coordinates directly. But you can't do this in Night Sky. To some degree offsetting this is a simple to use find feature (Command-F), and this is flexible enough to let you search for astronomical objects like stars and planets as well as constellations but it is limited in what it understands (for example you can search for Regulus but not Alpha Leonis).

Special Features

Night Sky responds to mouse clicks in six possible ways, but only one of these can be working at any given time, and the desired mode of mouse clicking is set in the menu bar. The most useful mode is has the simulation centre around the mouse click, but breaking with Macintosh conventions the application responds to single, not double, clicks. This is very annoying, not for aesthetic reasons, but for practical ones. If you switch to another application (even the Finder) and then try to get back to Night Sky by clicking on the sky simulation window, the simulation redraws, centring on wherever you clicked, messing up your view. So if you want to get back to where you were before, you have to find the thing you were centred on, and click on it again.

Another mouse clicking mode brings up a limited information window (yet again, this monopolizes the application and can't be left as a floating palette). The exact workings of this window weren't clear to me, for example clicking on the "Notes" button didn't seem to change anything. You can also edit the fields in the information window, though with no good reason, and it could be quite easy to mess up the data files this way. Additional mouse modes allows the user to add a star by clicking on a desired locality, or to delete or modify stars. A fifth mode allows the user to change the viewing location from Earth to whichever star is clicked on. This is pretty clever, though a downside is that the constellation patterns get totally messed up of course, so orienting yourself around this new night sky can be difficult. To get back to an Earth-centred view, you need to close the sky simulation window and then open a new one.

Clicking on stars can be used to display a limited amount of information.

Night Sky includes a number of other features, some of which are decidedly unusual. There is an "Auto Constellation" mode that creates seemingly random asterisms, though why this would be useful isn't obvious to me at least. Fortunately the default setting for the simulation has the constellations drawn in the traditional sort of way. A magnitude density mode replaces the stars with blurry blocks that (apparently) reflects the concentration of stars in any given patch rather than the brightness of individual stars. The "Brightness" menu item calls up a slider that allows the user to control the minimum magnitude of the stars being displayed, and the catalogue includes stars down to tenth magnitude. A "Twilight" option overlays the plain blue, white, yellow and orange stars on a black background with a blue hatch pattern, but doing so noticeably slows down screen redrawing.

Stars can be labelled "by group" and "by rank". So for example Betelgeuse is 59 by group and 1 by rank, that is in the fifty-ninth constellation when listed alphabetically, and the second brightest star, by apparent magnitude, in that constellation (zero is used for the brightest star, in this case Rigel). More traditional labelling, such as Beyer and Flamsteed numbers, are not available. The Sun, Moon and planets and the Messier objects are denoted by symbols. There are no monochrome or night vision modes, and although sky simulations can be saved in JPEG, PICT and PNG image formats, actually printing the charts off is handled poorly. There are no page setup options available, and there is no easy way to make sure the chart fits on the paper in the printer.

Conclusion

I wanted to like this application a lot. There are some vintage applications, like SimCity 2000 and ClarisWorks 2.1 that even by modern standards would be great applications if freshened up a little with an Aqua interface and optimised for G3 and G4 processors. I had hoped Night Sky would be another, but it isn't. Night Sky 3 is a deeply flawed application that simply doesn't stand up to the competition. MPj Equinox costs about the same but offers things like telescope control and a far more realistic sky simulation. Stargazer's Delight is more obviously designed for children having a much simpler interface and fun little extras and tutorials. Depending on what you wanted from you planetarium program, either of these would be a far better investment.

- Dr. Neale Monks

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