RedShift 7 for Windows (January 30, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Product: RedShift 7 Advanced
Vendor: United Soft Media (www.redshift7.com)
Price: $79.90/£49.90 (Boxed), $59.95 (download)
Supported OS: Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000

Ted Bade and I are both amateur astronomers. We’ve both used a lot of commercial and open source products for different operating systems – some which we cover on this site (Starry Night Pro, Voyager, etc) – and since Ted reviewed RedShift for the iPhone/iPad, we felt I should take a look at the version of the product for Windows: RedShift 7 Advanced.

I contacted the product vendor and they were happy to provide a download of the software to evaluate, so let’s get started with the evaluation.

Using the Software

I downloaded and installed the product on the Windows XP partition of my 2.26 GHz dual core Intel processor Macbook (~ 14 months old) which has a 250 GB hard drive and 2 GB RAM. No problems during either phase of this process. The software was installed in the C:\Program Files\Maris Technologies folder.

I began by checking out the UI. First of all I like the Getting Started screen:

This is ideal for the first time user. I checked out all of the tabs to learn how to use the software. Very nice.

Next I decided to take some of the many guided tours included with the software. The tours were good, but the quality of the planets and moons was not what I expected. I poked around and found a few options that looked like they could help (‘Extras/Enable OpenGL’, ‘View/Surface Features/Planets’ and ‘View/Surface Features/Moon’), so I enabled them, then restarted the software and took a few additional guided tours. Now I saw a nice improvement when I took the tour of the 5 main Jupiter moons.

This is the screen shot I took using RedShift 7, which shows Jupiter and 5 of the largest moons. I like the perspective as the orbits are clear and the information (in the box at the top right of the screen) was interesting. Only comment – the text appears center-justified.

Callisto – one of the larger moons of Jupiter, Callisto has been viewed as a potential landing site for a Jupiter system exploratory mission. Callisto is further away from Jupiter, so the closer and larger moon might be a better landing site.

Ganymede – probably my favorite Jupiter moon. This moon is bigger than Mercury, and it was the site of Robert Heinlein’s ‘Farmer in the Sky’ science fiction story about future colonizing efforts of humanity. This moon is closer to Jupiter, but the radiation levels there may be higher than on a moon that is further away.

Next, I checked out some of the space flight tours. I took the Mars tour and liked the quality of the image of the surface of Mars:

The next tour I checked out was Cassini, which was interesting as it was a 6 part tour which shows each phase of the complex flight the probe took. The probe had a complicated route to Saturn. It made several near planet passes to gain speed: twice by Venus, once by Earth, and once by Jupiter (mostly for course correction than for speed) before arriving at Saturn. This was an important mission as we took many great pictures of Saturn and the moon Titan. I would’ve liked to see some mention that the Cassini mission has been extended far beyond the planned life of the mission – this is interesting information and relevant to astronomy students.

I then ran the tour ‘Guided Tours/The Essentials/A comet plunges to its death’ which is a re-enactment of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which broke up and the chunks plunged into the atmosphere of Jupiter. The impacts were clear and RedShift has some of the images of those impacts.

There are also spaceflights for Yuri Gagarin (first human to orbit our planet in 1961), Apollo 13 (ill-fated and near disasterous trip to the moon in 1969), Voyager 2 (deep space probe launched in 1977), Galileo (Jupiter mission – launched in 1989 and sent into Jupiter atmosphere in 2003), the Mars Express, and the MER Opportunity and Spirit missions. The Mars Express mission was the ESA’s first Mars mission and it is still active today (January, 2011). The Opportunity and Spirit rovers were sent to roam over the surface of Mars and take pictures. Both are still on Mars, however the Spirit rover stopped responding to NASA after a short while, but the Opportunity rover is still active and is currently parked at the Santa Maria Crater (January, 2011), where it is taking some revealing images.

I was surprised at some missions that were missing, like the Apollo 11 and the New Horizons missions. Apollo 11 was the first manned landing on the moon and is much a landmark as Yuri Gagarin’s first mission into space. New Horizons is on the way to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, which as also huge.

I only had one bad experience using this software. Three times when I was working with guided tours, RedShift 7 crashed with the following error message:

I am running with the most current Windows XP updates on my Macbook dual core CPU laptop. If anyone else sees this error, please contact United Soft Media so they have more information to use to address this problem. This is not a show stopper, and it may not be a problem for other versions of Windows.

Conclusion

I enjoyed using RedShift 7 Advanced. The guided tours are very useful, although a few seemed to take longer than I’d prefer. After getting comfortable with the user interface, I enjoyed using this software.  There is good information, although it would be nice to see more information. I love how the company website is positively loaded with astronomy-related content, which is available to people that don’t have RedShift.

Positives

• Number of supported versions of Windows – good to see they still support Windows 2000 users, as well as Windows 7.
• The price is right. A good value for the low-cost of the software, especially the download version.
• The installed software didn’t kill my drive space. It only took 1.24 GB of space, which is pretty low when compared to other astronomy products.
• Getting Started screen, which has many features new users will want to access immediately to learn how to use the software.
• An excellent website to support the product, as well as provide a tremendous amount of astronomy-related content.
• Guided Tours – very nice. A lot of them to help build interest in astronomy.
• Number of configurable options – very good. It is useful to be able to specify actions to occur at start-up or when exiting the program. I wish more vendors did this, as most serious users want to have as much control of their environments as possible.
• Telescope Control support – a must for serious users.

Areas for Improvement

• The company needs to find and fix the uncaught exception that caused the software to crash 3 times over the months I was evaluating RedShift.
• Some of the UI controls had an old school feel to them. They did function, but were not as modern as some other astronomy packages I’ve used. I’d love to see the UI updated in the next major release of the product.
• I had to enable the software to use OpenGL for video, as well as turn on surface features for planets and moons. Both of these affected the quality of the software images and I’d rather be asked at first launch if I want those features enabled, instead of finding them after I look at the software. Initially I was not impressed by the quality of the images, but after enabling these features I was much happier.
• I liked the tours, but some seemed to go without a lot happening. A nice sound track or slide show with thumbnails of the tour subject would make these more interesting. I’d also like to see planetary tours similar to what is done at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org, which are very informative and visually interesting.
• Many good space flights/missions, but not the Apollo 11 or the New Horizons missions.

Recommendation

A good value and recommended for astronomy students of any level. The tours are a nice touch for students just learning about the missions and the planets and stars, as well as for older folk wanting to recall the things that so captivated television audiences in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s.

Uranus (June 24, 2011)

By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2010, All Rights Reserved.

Uranus Facts:

• Location: 7th planet from the sun
• Size: 3rd largest planet in our solar system
• Orbit: 19.22 AU
• Orbital Period: 84.07 Julian Years *
• Average Distance from Earth: 19.2 AUs *
• Diameter: 4X that of earth
• Discovered: 1781 by William Herschel
• Atmosphere: hydrogen, helium, water, methane, ammonia
• Interesting facts: the planetary axis of rotation is titled sideways (97 degrees), which is unique for a planet in our solar system; the first planet discovered by a telescope; visited by Voyager 2.
• Total number of moons: 27 (Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Cupid, Belinda, Perdita, Puck, Mab, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon, Francisco, Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo, Sycorax, Margaret, Prospero, Setebos, and Ferdinand)
• Click here for Wolfram|Alpha data on Uranus

* = Courtesy of Wolfram Astronomy Assistant

So far I’ve covered three gas giant planets, and now I turn my eye (and software) to Uranus, one of the dimmest and least dense planets in the solar system.

Uranus is unique for several reasons. First, it is blue to blue-green in color, due to the methane content of the atmosphere. Second, Uranus is the only planet that is titled on it’s axis – slightly over 97 degrees. Third, Uranus was the first planet discovered with a telescope. Four, astronomers were able to use Uranus to determine where to look to find Neptune.

What to know what else is interesting about Uranus today, January 18, 2011? Today the New Horizons probe to Pluto is close to passing the orbital path of Uranus and continuing on its trek past Neptune and on to Pluto. Call me an astronomy geek, but I think that is cool.

Now lets get back to our planet of choice. Uranus has 27 odd satellites, and the closest of the 5 large moons is Miranda, so I took a quick trip to look at it. Rather plain, especially compared to some of Jupiter’s moons.

I like the quality of the images of both Uranus and Miranda in Starry Night Pro. They are so much nicer than the land telescope images we had before Voyager 2 made the long trek out to Uranus. I should add that earlier astronomy programs used Voyager 2 images of Uranus and other planets in the solar system, which really enhanced the experience of using the software.

I decided I’d like to see Uranus from Miranda’s surface (a nice feature of Starry Night), and it was a real treat. Uranus is fairly large and clearly visible from Miranda, as you might expect as it is a mere 130,000 km from Uranus.

Why this perspective from the surface of Miranda? Because Miranda has some canyons that are 20 km deep! Impressive. Miranda may be the smallest of the large Uranus satellites, but it’s proximity to Uranus could make it an interesting landing site for a future probe.

Fun, then it was time to look at Uranus and Miranda as they would be seen by an approaching spacecraft. I like how easy that was to setup in Starry Night Pro.

There are a lot of people without astronomy hardware or software, and those people can take advantage of Microsoft’s free WorldWideTelescope.org site to check out some nice digital images of Uranus, as well as the other planets of the solar system:

That’s it for now. Have a safe and happy holiday season.

– Mike

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Updates

6-24-2011 – Added Orbital Period, Average Distance from Earth information.

2-14-2011 – Added names of all moons.