Copyright 2001 StarGazerSoft, All rights reserved.
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About Clear Skies!
Clear Skies! is a Macintosh shareware program that brings you the night sky on your desktop.
It draws a picture of the sky and sets it as the desktop picture.
You can choose the time and date and enter a location anywhere on earth and the sky is calculated accordingly. There are a lot of display options such as show stars during daylight, show/hide constellations, coordinate grid, names of constellations, deep sky objects and more.
Requirements
• Any PowerMac (PPC)
• Mac OS 8.5 or higher
Installation
Unstuff Clear Skies! That's it.
You may put the program in the Startup Folder in the System Folder in order to run it each time you start up your Mac.
Registration
Clear Skies! is shareware. The registration fee is US $ 10.
You may test Clear Skies! for 30 days. After that you must either delete it from your computer or register your copy.
You can send me a 10 dollar bill (or 20 SFr or 20 DM, please no checks!) by snail mail or you can register online with a credit card through a safe (SSL) connection.
The following link will direct you to Kagi (which handles my payment processing):
http://order.kagi.com/?UOB
Configuration
To configure Clear Skies!, start the program and immediately click again. This will bring up a tabbed dialog where you can set your preferences.
The options in detail:
Time and Location tab:
• System Date & Time: The program will always use the time and date of the internal clock of your Mac.
• Today/Tomorrow: Enter a time in the provided clock control and the program will always calculate the sky at the given time today (or tomorrow).
• Temporary Custom Date: Enter a time and date and the program will calculate the sky accordingly. This only affects this run. The next time you start Clear Skies! it will take the time you entered into 'System Date & Time' or 'Today' or 'Tomorrow'.
• Daylight Saving: Check this box during the months of daylight-saving time (if there is any in your country).
• Location: Choose one of the predefined cities from the pop-up menu or set your custom location by entering a name and the coordinates (don't forget to set the time zone!).
• Time Zone: This is the offset from Greenwich Mean Time (London). Towards East it's counted positive, towards West negative. Washington for instance has a time zone of -5 hours whereas Paris has (plus) 1 hour.
Display tab:
• Constellations: Shows or hides the lines that draw the (imaginary) figures of the constellations.
• Boundaries of the Constellations: Shows or hides these boundaries. The sky is officially divided into 88 constellations of different shapes and dimensions.
• Horizon: Draws or hides a few trees and houses for better orientation.
• Coordinate grid: Shows or hides some concentric circles from 0° (horizon) to 90° (zenith).
• Ecliptic: This is the path of the sun (and more or less of all the planets) during one year.
• Equator: This is the Earth's equator projected into the sky.
• Names of Constellations: Writes the names of the constellations.
• Status: Shows or hides the name and the coordinates of the selected location and the date and time in the upper left corner of the screen.
• Legend of Planets Symbols: Draws the symbols and labels them for easy recognition of the planets.
• Deep Sky Objects: Deep sky objects are galaxies, star clusters and nebulae. Some of them, such as the Orion Nebula or the Andromeda Nebula, you can see with the naked eye (but you have to have a really dark sky for this, preferably outside a city).
• Show Messier Number: Charles Messier was one of the first to publish a list of all the brighter deep sky objects.
• Show NGC Number: NGC stands for New General Catalog of Galaxies and Star Clusters.
• Show Planets as: You have the option to have the planets displayed as symbols, squares or stars (in the right magnitude).
• Show Planets Names: Writes the names of the planets and the minor planets.
• Show Minor Planets: Besides the 9 major planets there are thousands of minor planets. Only a handful of them can be seen with the naked eye (and only when they are near the Earth). Clear Skies! shows you the 12 brightest minor planets.
Miscellaneous tab:
• Use random Color: Let the program select a random background color each time it starts up.
• Choose Background Color: Click on the colored rectangle to select a background color that suits your T-shirt or iMac.
• Show stars during daylight: If this option is checked the program draws all the stars and planets etc. also during daylight or twilight. Objects that are not (yet) visible to the naked eye are drawn black, others white.
• Show initial splash-screen: If you disable this option, you can still bring up the preferences dialog by clicking with the mouse, but you're no longer reminded of it.
• Quit and remove Clear Skies! picture: Click this button to remove the picture that Clear Skies! has generated and to restore your old desktop pattern and/or picture. (To your information: Clear Skies! saves its picture in the file 'ClearSkiesPicture' in the Preferences Folder in the System Folder. You can also use the Control Panel 'Appearance' to set another desktop picture.)
Most often asked questions
Q: Why are West and East in the wrong place?
A: They are not, it's just another thing than in maps! This is a spherical projection. It is about what you see when you lie on your back on the ground and take a picture with an ultra wide angle objective.
And it's just as in real life: When you look towards South you have EAST on your left and WEST on your right.
Q: Pluto seems to be in an ideal observing position, but I can't see it when I look at the sky...
A: Clear Skies! shows you what you can see with the naked eye in a dark night. With the exeption of Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and most of the minor planets. To spot those you have to use a binocular or a telescope since they are very faint. And for Pluto you have to use a really big telescope!
Other programs by StarGazerSoft
Stargazer's Delight. The big brother of Clear Skies!.
A fully featured desktop planetarium and sky simulator!
It's like your desktop picture getting alive! You can zoom in, animate it, get information about all of its over 260'000 stars. See the phases of the moon, the apparent brightness of the planets, the length of day, the paths of the planets, animations of the sky, great pictures of the planets, animated tutorials on selected astronomical questions and much more!
Download it at:
http://www.stargazersoft.com
Version History
Version 1.1.2:
• Fixed a bug that in rare cases could bring up an error message at the first launch.
Version 1.1.1:
• Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented the preference dialog to show up.
Version 1.1:
• Clear Skies! can optionally show the stars during daylight or twilight (the stars visible to the naked eye are drawn black, others white).
• Clear Skies! lets you select a color for the background.
• Clear Skies! can generate random background colors.
• New button to remove the Clear Skies! picture and restore your old desktop pattern and/or picture.
• Fixed a (most of the time sleeping) crashing memory bug.
Version 1.0:
• initial release.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Didier Guillion from Myriad Software (http://www.myriad-online.com) for his great help and support!
