EDITORIAL INFORMATION

DEEP SPACE Ver. 5 (for MS DOS computers) is more than just another planetarium program. DEEP SPACE is a full-featured observing guide: a reliable introduction for beginners and a practical tool for advanced users. DEEP SPACE generates publication quality star maps, designed for clarity and low distortion. It serves as an almanac, an ephemeris and finder chart generator for planets, comets, and asteroids, an annotated deep sky reference, an observing log utility, a telescope controller and much more. DEEP SPACE is easy to learn, with a 100 page printed manual and two levels of help available from within the program. Included are three major overview sections addresed to the separate needs of beginners, teachers, and advanced observers.

(Extracted from the press release).

OUR REVIEW

The program we have here is probably one of the most suitable, complete ones for field work, for the day-to-day amateur astronomical observation. Technically it is a brilliantly solved, very evolved system; no wonder it is version 5. Its authors claim that DEEP SPACE has been developed with observation in mind. So, among many other things, it is capable of storing its own list of observation sites; computing and displaying in a graphic way sunrise and moonrise, sunset and moonset, dusk limits, etc., so as to be able to better plan their appearances; drawing stellar maps of all sorts and printing them; including planets and their orbits, comets (even the new ones) and asteroids; setting deep space objects by means of flexible criteria and adding labels to distinguish them more easily; keeping a record of the users' observations in an automatic way; keeping groups and lists of selected objects; drawing stellar maps in three dimensions showing the true relationship among their components, moving in realtime or going backwards and forwards in time; using portable computers to utilize the program in the observation field, with or without a telescope, etc.

The simple fact that this software can control the orientation of a type LX-200 telescope thanks to an adequate interface (DEEP SPACE NAVIGATOR) or any other telescope with a digital interface is a good indication that it is well aimed at the practical aspects and not only a mere entertainment for the astronomical sciences. Both the program and the data bases are stored in a CD-ROM because of the great amount of catalogued objects: no less than the Hubble Guide Star Catalog (18 million stars), the NASA Skymap (250,000 stars) the Messier/NGC catalogues for deep sky objects (10,000 objects) and the DASTCOM of the JPL (with more than 10,000 asteroids and comets). All in all, a program that has achieved an absolute maturity, thought for and by observers or those who intend to become observers some day.

To work the program needs a compatible computer PC 386 or better, with 640k of RAM memory plus 1MB of extended memory, a CD-ROM player, MS DOS 3.0 or better and a VGA card . Characteristics which are available nowadays in most amateur observatories using computer science as an auxiliary tool for their work.