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Sample Screen Shots from Deep Space
This page shows only a few of the many options available in Deep Space. Many Deep Space options are found in no other commercially available program.
The All Night Summary Map is a 360° wrap-around view of the sky centered on the point overhead at midnight. The yellow curve to the far right is the western horizon at sunset. A little to the left of it is the western horizon at the end of evening twilight. On the left side of the map is the eastern horizon at the beginning of morning twilight and sunrise. The yellow line at the bottom is the southern limit for the latitude of your observing site. (If you are south of the equator the northern limit is shown.) This is the ideal overview planning map for a night's observing. Everything that can be seen sometime during the night is shown between the horizon curves. This is a unique Deep Space feature.
Using the All Night Summary Map as a starting point, you can select smaller area maps with the cursor to easily produce finder charts of any scale, add deep sky objects, comets, planets, asteroids, orbital paths, grid lines, constellation names, constellation boundaries, and more. This map shows the region of the central Summer Milky Way. The cursor is identifying the globular cluster M 107. The observing log entry and the catalog data for this cluster are displayed in two windows at the bottom of the screen. (Both windows are scrollable.) The Milky Way has been digitized from a specially commissioned two-tone rendition by the renowned space artist Don Davis. Don's artwork is known for its detailed accuracy.
From the earliest versions, Deep Space has offered the best package of comet computation and plotting features of any program available. Comet Stonehouse (C/1998 H1), whose elements were downloaded from the IAU web site, is shown over a range of dates at 5 day intervals. The cursor identifies its position on May 22 and estimates a predicted magnitude of 12.1. Note that the tail changes length and direction. The line indicating the tail shows the antisolar direction and the length the tail would appear (taking into account the position angle, phase angle, and distance of the comet) if the physical length were 1/10 AU (about 10 million miles). If the actual tail is half this long you could reasonably conclude its physical length is about 5 million miles.
Most of the features of Deep Space are oriented toward observing. A second theme is understanding. Deep Space is a powerful teaching and visualization tool. The map shown here is plotted in galactic coordinates, aligned with the plane of the Milky Way. (Any map can be plotted in equatorial, horizon, ecliptic, or galactic coordinates.) All the globular clusters in the database are displayed, showing the concentration of globular clusters toward the center of the galaxy. Historically this was the first clue that our solar system lies away from the center of our galaxy. The distribution of open clusters, by contrast, lies concentrated along the centerline of the Milky Way, along with the bright and dark nebulae, and the distribution of galaxies avoids the Milky Way almost entirely. Can you anticipate the distribution of the planetary nebulae?
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