Technical data

Chapter 2 File 5
Introduction
Welcome to Autostar Suite, the Desktop Observatory. Now you can perform many of the same computer assisted
observing tasks as professional astronomer would do on a large institutional observatories. With Autostar Suite you
can:
• View the sky as it appears from anywhere on Earth.
• See over 45,000 stars in their B-V colors.
• View scaled representations of over 13,000 clusters, nebulas, galaxies and other deep sky objects.
• Accurately display and animate all of the planets, 7700 asteroids and 650 comets.
• Using the high precision option, determine the position of the solar system object to an accuracy better than 1
second of arc.
• Zoom-in to a field-of-view less than 1 second of arc.
• Measure angular distance between stellar objects.
• Enhance high resolution CCD images using advanced image processing techniques.
• Determine stellar magnitudes directly from CCD images, and a number of other powerful features.
• Control your telescope with your computer either from a direct connection, or remotely via a network.
• Monitor your telescope’s position on your computer as you observe
• Control solid state astronomical imagers.
• Analyze your observations
• Process image in color or black and white.
A Note on Accuracy
Autostar Suite was designed to be extremely powerful and accurate. Many programs designed for the PC have taken
shortcuts to appear faster, but at the expense of accuracy! Not Autostar Suite! By carefully coding each section of the
program using 64 bit floating point numbers, Autostar Suite takes full advantage of your Math Coprocessor to provide
fast and accurate performance. This gives you the power and accuracy that rivals main-frame computer performance.
The high precision does come with some cost in performance. Even though great care was taken to provide the most
efficient code possible, Autostar Suite may be slower at certain functions, such as starmap generation, than programs
that calculate positions only to a precision barely suitable for display purposes.
All calculations are performed using the most rigorous forms of the algorithms. The resulting values are comparable to
those found in the Astronomical Almanac. Any resulting discrepancies are a result of the original values of the input
data, not from programming short cuts. For example, the positions of the asteroids and comets, are first calculated to a
high level of accuracy using Newton's method to solve Kepler's equation for the solution of an elliptical orbit. Then
the coordinates are corrected for the time it takes for the light from the object to reach the Earth and for planetary
aberration. This assures that the resulting values are correct for that exact instant of time. Finally, the coordinates are
corrected for the precession and nutation of the Earth. If you have chosen the Topocentric precision option, the values
are then corrected to show the position from your selected viewing site's latitude, longitude and elevation. Many other
programs only use approximate formulae which may be valid only for a small time span.
System Requirements
The minimum system required to run Autostar Suite are as follows:
• 64 Meg Ram.
• Hard Disk with 12 Megabytes of free space.
• Super VGA adapter and compatible monitor.
• Windows 98SE or greater
• Pentium CPU IBM-PC/AT or faster.
• A Microsoft compatible mouse.