CURRENT MOON

First let me state that I'm not affiliated with Astroplanner and receive no money or any other perks for writing this review. I've used the program for 4 years and think it's the best option available for what it does. Read on to find out why.

There are several programs out there to plan your night observations with. Astroplanner has more catalogues than any other program I know of to choose from - 129 currently and adding more all the time. You can also use objects from several different catalogues included in the same plan. Astroplanner also has the ability to control your telescope in the field.

Everyone has their own observing "style". Personally I like to view objects I've never seen before. Astroplanner uses a global observation database so if a object appears in more than one of the catalogues it's already listed as observed when I open that catalogue. As an example: I had already gone thru the Messier, Caldwell and Herschel 400 lists. When I opened up the ARP Peculiar Galaxies list I found I had already observed 47 of them. This eliminated the redundancy of viewing the same object several times while working on the Astronomical League Observing Programs.

The program also allows you to add a rating for each of your observations. You can then search through the global database and quickly create lists of the best objects you've observed automatically. It also has the ability to run scripts internally. There is a fairly large selection of scripts written by the author and users available, or you can write your own if so inclined. My favorite script is "print finder charts" written by Michael Portuesi. It was used to create the finder charts available on this site.

The author of Astroplanner is Paul Rodman. There is a Yahoo.com user group for Astroplanner. I've never seen customer support like Paul provides. Questions, bug reports, and feature requests are usually answered in a couple of hours at most. Paul is unusually receptive of user feature requests if they are possible.

I've only touched on the capabilities of this program here. For a full listing of what Astroplanner can do for you check out the Astroplanner Website