I really can't make heads or tails of this software. I was sold in about two minutes a few years ago when a club member made a presentation about SkyTools. It looked so amazing that I had to have it, and we could even get a discount with a group buy. I was 'all in', so to speak. I had been happily using Megastar for years with no issues, but SkyTools just looked amazing and I wanted to try it.

After looking at the demos online, I am still really impressed how anyone could be this brilliant or have enough time in one lifetime to create this software.

But, all I can manage to do, so far, is to bring up a list of, say, open clusters, but if I try to view the interactive atlas, naked eye sky, etc. for one of them, I just get a more or less blank screen with no star chart. When I click on some things to try to bring up the star chart, a window comes up telling me that SkyTools stopped working and I have to close it. Then I start the software again to try something else to get it to work...with no success.

There are many other things that don't work, but that one is the key feature for me - the interactive sky. Another issue is that double stars don't even give me a list (not to mention not being able to see them on the interactive sky - I can't even get the software to display a list). I also can't get a list of, say, all the Bayer stars or Flamsteed stars in a constellation, and most other features I could name simply don't work.

I can't imagine what is causing these issues. I'm using a Microsoft SurfacePro 3 and Win10. I don't have problems in general with this machine. Any clues what might be going wrong? Thank you for your help.  -Jason

I was hoping that the tightly spaced Jupiter/Mars pair would clear the trees before the dawn sky brightened too much – the trees blocking my Eastern Horizon had grown considerably in the last 12 months.
 
Tantalising glimpses of Jupiter and the 4 Galilean Moons materialised on the LCD on the back of the camera as the topmost branches swayed in the light breeze when finally, Jupiter and Mars cleared the top of the trees and I could get to work recording this close conjunction.
 
I took several frames at varying ISO speeds (ISO100 to ISO3200) and shutter speeds (1/8 sec to 30 secs) so I could later select frames that showed the field stars (Jupiter and Mars grossly over exposed) and the disc of Jupiter with the equatorial bands.
 
A little bit of Photoshop magic allowed me to combine the sets and produce this composite.
 
Cheers
 
Dennis
 
PS -  According to ST3 Pro, the separation between Jupiter and Mars was some 14 arc mins, less than ½ diameter of the full Moon. Brisbane, Qld, Australia, 7th Jan 2018 at 4:15 am AEST (UT+10).

   

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Doing minor planet astrometric work, I will often use SkyTools3 to generate an observing list of minor planets (alongside of the Minor Planet Centers list generator). I concentrate mainly on NEO's and use the database search tool to put my list together, I am able to single out what particular type asteroids are, Aten's, Apollo's etc. However when I generate my list, the only ID shown of the minor planets selected is the name and or number ID. Is there a way to also list what type of asteroid it is? For example, I print out a list of asteroids visible for the night. While I could see what type of each was in the database search, once I create the list and print it, I only have names and numbers, nothing to tell me the types. It would be great if the types were also listed. Maybe I am overlooking something.

Thanks and best regards,
Randy

Hi,

I have a long term problem in ST3Pro (Win7/64) using Supplemental Data Download function.
If I download and am refreshing any Minor Planet Data package, the program will be waiting a lot for Stellar, Deep Sky and Skymarks checking (sometimes 4-5 minutes!!!) after completing minor planet data  refreshing.

Why?
How may I shorten this long and needless (?) part of this process?


Thanks,
Attila

I just got around to installing SkyTools 3 on my MS Surface 4 Pro.  I was having the display issue with the maps that was noted in the support section on the SkyTools website (graphical overlay portion of the display is confined to the upper left of the map on all of the chart views).  I went through the entire troubleshooting section:

1.  Display driver is up to date.
2.  Turning the scaling off DOES solve the chart issue but makes the list view unreadable.
3.  No matter what other settings I try (resolution and font size combinations), if I fix the Chart view, the list view is unreadable.

Ideas?  I can send screen shots if desired.

Is there still a comet page?  A google search provides many results, but virtually all of them give me this message...

This site can’t be reached

observing.skyhound.com’s server DNS address could not be found.   -or-

The webpage at http://cometchasing.skyhound.com/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

What's up?

Greg,

Obviously, there's value in the old Yahoo!Group in terms of archival messages, files, etc.

Do you have plans to turn off new message posting there?

Looking forward to Nereid being included in ST4 - thanks Greg.

In the meantime, here are a couple of images of Nereid taken from my back yard on 27th & 28th August 2016.

Taken using a Tak Mewlon 210, Tak x0.8 Reducer/Flattener and an ATIK 414 EX camera. I captured 75x60 sec frames on 27th Aug and 37x120 secs on 28th Aug. Images were calibrated, aligned and stacked using CCDStack2 and finished in CS6. You can easily see the movement of Neptune, Triton and Nereid against the field stars over the two nights of 27th & 28th August 2016.
 
The full size originals have a FOV of 15.2 x 11.3 arcmin at 0.65 arcsec/pixel. The 1024x768 crops have a FOV of 13 x 9.7 arcmin.

Cheers

Dennis

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I would have thought that there would be a lot of posts here.  After all, observing double stars is the most fun you can have in Astronomy!  

I do have a real question.  I love how SkyTools has made my double star observing a snap.  This has probably been answered before, but are there improvements specifically for doubles in ST 4?

John..

Long time user of SkyTools for my doubles!

On the Minor Planet Mailing List today (19-Nov-2017), Alan Hale, of Comet Hale-Bopp fame, posted this alert...

Quote:Just to remind everyone, Phaethon passes 0.069 AU from Earth on December 16 [2017] — the closest it has approached Earth since its discovery in 1983, and it won’t make a closer approach until 2093. Right now it’s  moving rather slowly – barely over 10 arcminutes per day — since it’s coming almost right at us; when closest to Earth it will be traveling at 15 degrees per day and should be as bright as 10th magnitude.