Hale-Bopp, 1997 This view of Hale-Bopp shows the comet at 8:00 p.m. on March 20, 1997, as seen from the belvedere on top of my house. The local horizon is a photorealistic panorama I created for Starry Night Pro so that I could see on my screen exactly what I can see from my rooftop. This is the first image I made after upgrading to Starry Night Pro 4.5.

Our Home, the Milky Way The Milky Way Galaxy, so named because early stargazers saw it as a milky area stretching across the night sky, is the home of our star, the Sun. This view, made in late November 2004, shows the Milky Way, along with our two nearest neighbors, the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds, from a point about 200,000 light-years (about 12,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles) away from the galactic center. You can’t pick out the Sun among the other hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, but this sure is pretty, isn’t it? All those little bright spots, by the way, are not stars. They’re galaxies.(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Starry Night Gallery
The Sun’s new baby: artist’s conception of Asteroid (plutino) 2000 EB173, October 28, 2000	The International Space Station, “Alpha,” as of October 2000	Phobos & Deimos from 442 km above Mars, 2:00:00 UTC, May 20, 2000. FOV 30’.
Apollo 11 Lunar Ascent Module and sky, from Command Module (LM and moon surface from NASA photo)	Space Station One, from 2000: A Space Odyssey, over the coast of Africa November 5, 2000, 5:10:00 UTC	The Hubble Space Telescope over the western coast of Australia, 3:18:00 UTC, November 11, 2000
The RMS Titanic and the sky five minutes before the ship struck the iceberg (image credits)	Saturn, from 167 km above its satellite Mimas, at 14:00 UTC, November 1, 2000	Ptolemy’s Rosette: A thing of beauty (Click for explanation)

Starry Night is fun, but it’s also a serious astronomy tool. Starry Night Pro can drive any of several different telescopes for a night’s observing, or it can take you anywhere within 700 million light-years of Earth. Its "LiveSky" feature allows you to attach documents, images, and even Web sites to any celestial object. And it’s being used by SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Or you can start at with the basics by downloading Starry Night Digital Download — even this inexpensive version knows about 35,000 sky objects. Astronomy Plus has more features and 100,000 oblects, and Starry Night Enthusiast ups the ante to over a million objects. Starry Night Pro’s database contains a catalog of almost a million galaxies as well as the complete Messier, NGC/IC, SAO, Hipparcos/Tycho and Hubble catalogs. With Starry Night Pro, you can download deep-sky images directly from the Digitized Sky Survey into Starry Night. You can also download and add specialized databases. ’Nuff said? To learn much more about Starry Night, visit www.starrynight.com. There are other sites on the World Wide Web where you can view Starry Night images; just search for "Starry Night". There’s even a site where you can download add-ons for Starry Night.

	Maps of the Solar System. This is where I found many of the planetary surface images I used with Starry Night 3. Excellent site, with links to sites containing other images, many of which are in Starry Night 4.
	LiveSky, the companion site for Starry Night, by SPACE.com Canada. A good site with a great deal of astronomical information and links to more. The Starry Night programs have a direct link to this site; bring up the info window for an object, and click to go to LiveSky for more.
	Amateur Astronomy, by John Rummel. A nice compact hobbyist’s site, with some good articles and some of John’s own photos of deep-sky objects. You might recognize his starry background; he’s using my background image.
	My spacecraft images for Starry Night. I have several sets available, with five spacecraft in each set.
	Astronomy isn’t my only hobby. I also collect, repair and sell fountain pens.

Thank you for visiting! Feel free to send me your comments. DISCLAIMER: I have no affiliation with Imaginova. I’m just an enthusiastic owner of Starry Night Pro. Last updated November 28, 2004. This page and all images used herein, except product badges, are © 2000-2004 by Richard F. Binder .