Meet the Skyhound

Greg Crinklaw, the author of SkyTools, is an accomplished astronomer, educator, and programmer. Greg became interested in astronomy at an early age and spent many evenings scanning the skies with his tiny Tasco refractor. He still recalls not knowing how to focus the instrument—he once showed his grandfather an out-of-focus star that filled the field of view.

Greg went on to bigger and better telescopes and eventually pursued a BS in astronomy at San Diego State University. Now properly trained in the art of focusing, he went on to obtain master's degrees in both astronomy and astrophysics. Always the observer rather than the theoretician, his published works include studies of open star clusters, eclipsing binary stars, and interstellar calcium.

Greg eventually worked for NASA on the Mars Observer project. He was responsible for developing the image processing software used to view and analyze the images sent back by the Mars Orbiter Camera. Although Mars Observer failed just as it reached the Red Planet, his work lived on in its replacement, Mars Global Surveyor.

As an avid enthusiast of both the night sky and the science behind it, Greg taught introductory college astronomy courses on a part-time basis for nearly a decade. Always enthusiastic and willing to share the wonders of the universe with anyone who will listen, he tries to keep in mind the young boy who didn't know how to focus his tiny telescope.

SkyTools Visual stands head and shoulders above other astronomy software, modeling the human eye and visual contrast to predict how difficult an object will be in the eyepiece and when the best time of night will be to view it.

These days, Greg and his family live in the mountain village of Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Greg is an avid deep sky observer who also enjoys observing telescopic comets. His experience with imaging, both in astronomy and for NASA, led him to develop SkyTools 4 Imaging, planning software for long-exposure imaging that models the properties of the target object, telescope, camera, filters, and atmospheric conditions to predict the signal on the camera detector as it changes under differing circumstances. The result is an extraordinary and powerful tool for planning long-exposure imaging, far ahead of anything currently available.