I'm posting this here because I don't think this is a bug, per se, but it's certainly a point for technical support. First, I love the program. I'm running SE 8 that Celestron gives you with a major purchase and it's the best PC sky simulation/mapping software I've ever run. No more finagling with comet ephemerides, the other night I saw that C2021 S3 was visible, right button clicked for the current RA/Dec, walked out to the telescope and input the coordinates and I have a nice image of the comet. I'm running it under Windows 10, all up to date, on a Dell Lattitude 6440.
If I let the program run for over 1/2 hour- definitely by an hour- it starts consuming resources at an increasing rate until the program, then Windoze finally hangs. Last time it actually corrupted the registry file, though I'm pretty sure that had more to do with a hard drive that was about to fail, but it still happened because of the stress SN was putting on the system. I'm an MCSE and my best guess is that what's happening is that SN is using more memory the longer it runs and it's eventually forcing the system to start swapping (the maching has 2 gig RAM with an appropriate sized swap file). I can tell you professionally that you are always in trouble when Windoze starts to swap, so the behavior makes sense, it's not really a bug, but I'm still wondering why it is taking up so much of the system resources and if there is anything I can do as far as options, etc., to reduce its impact. I've tried limiting it to 15 minutes at a time, which works, but- no exaggeration- I fell asleep the other day and it ran two hours, and, well, I ended up re-installing Win 10. And I'm not aware you have an Ubuntu version.
Thanks for any info!
Update: It is much better behaved now, so the worst of what I described as due to a hard drive in imminent failure mode, but the question still stands. It is definitely using a significant amount of resources, mainly CPU time. I can understand that when you see features like continually updating the distance from earth of every asteroid visible, so that's why I was wondering if there were things I had not discovered that could be turned off. Feeling the CPU breathing hot and heavy isn't really worth knowing that for me.
