Starry Night software is a good piece of software, but it fails on something really essencial, that is represent a faithful, true image of the sky. The problem is that most stars on the software have similar bright, they look most alike, and the real thing is very very diferent. For example, these days the planet Jupiter is very bright on the sky ( mag -2.51 ). When we look at the software, it´s even dificult to distinguish Jupiter bright from a fainter star like Hamal, which magnitude is only 2.06. They bright alike. After messing around with adjust on the software, I almost gave up in trying to obtain a true sky representation of the Sky with "Starry Night Pro 6" software, when I finaly came to the conclusion that this problem only would be solved easily if we could adjust bright for each magnitude level, for instance:
A slider to adjust bright and size on the screen from objects on magnitudes between -3.00 to -2.00
A slider to adjust bright and size on the screen from stars on magnitudes between -2.00 to -1.60
A slider to adjust magnitudes between -1.60 to -1.00
A slider to adjust magnitudes between -1.00 to 0.00
A slider to adjust magnitudes between 0.00 to 1.00
A slider to adjust magnitudes between 1.00 to 2.00
A slider to adjust magnitudes between 2.00 to 3.00
A slider to adjust magnitudes between 3.00 to 4.00
A slider to adjust magnitudes between 4.00 to 6.00
And so on...
Starry Night is good, but it does not show how the real sky is. There are old software, including project PLUTO, which allowed us to adjust stars bright independently.
So, I think this would be a big enhancement to the software.
All the best,
Dihelson Mendonça
