Hi Tom, The program with animations with the most robust support for educators appears to be Starry Night. Their most basic download version for about $25 allows you to add satellites to the database, which could be a fine project for your students. Note to get the most accurate SGP4 predictions, you would need to spring for a Pro version. You might ask if they ship demos to educators. The program's strengths are its animations and simulating multiple points of view. You might ask their customer service to confirm capabilities for each version, but in my copy you can show a satellite orbit before a satellite passes. It will slowly shift when you animate in real time. To plot satellite positions, you have to turn on the plot function and run the pass to get a series of points which are correct for the Celestial Sphere OR for your local Alt-Az coordinates. They also have discounted site licenses for 5 or more installations. Promotional coupons come out frequently for the other versions. See this link for comparisons between the versions, and also look for the educator link. http://www.starrynight.com/support/product_comparison/ I have not looked at STK recently, but they were formerly shipping the introductory professional satellite management software for no charge. I don't recall it including star data at the time however. Animations are a strong suit, showing the detailed Earth below. Cheers, Dan Laszlo Fort Collins CO -----Original Message----- From: sciteach@mchsi.com To: SeeSat-L@satobs.org Sent: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 8:31 PM Subject: Re: Sat Prediction Software advice I very much appreciate everyone's advice even if it isn't something I will use right now. I like the software I have but, cost for multiple computer usage is my biggest problem. I can use a power point projector but that does not allow each participant to work with the subject matter themselves. I have a question that I more or less asked earlier but am elaborating on now. That is, does anyone know of a planetarium program, free ort not, -other than TheSky- that shows satellites moving in real time against a background of stars? Up until a few hours ago I assumed that most of them did. Nuts. Maybe there is something less expensive than TheSky. The two CDs we purchased a few years ago were about $240.00 for a single computer; it may be less these days. The unfortunate thing is we had to get much more than a basic program to work with TLEs. I'm apparently spoiled by real time graphics. For example, while outside with my laptop I see a satellite passing through a certain constellation and look up and there it is (assuming it's bright enough to see). The only thing better would be if the satellite image would get bigger or change color if the predicted brightness was greater. TheSky also lets a user speed through time at any of a number of different intervals, forward or back. [[Do other programs do that?]] TheSky can be set to show the path of the satellite against the star field but does not show time marks. I have to determine that for the seconds (not for the hours or minutes) by going to a Data file, but that's only one click away. Thanks! Tom Iowa USA 42 28' 24.84" by 92 21' 36.9" or 42.47357 by -92.36025 about 300 meters above sea level -6 hours offset to UTC during standard time months ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html\\ ________________________________________________________________________ Check out AOL.com today. Breaking news, video search, pictures, email and IM. All on demand. Always Free. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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