“Experience a trip around galaxies with this realistic navigator”

Go beyond the confines of the Earth and explore the Universe with this planetarium-style computer program. It’s fascinating to see 3D simulations and navigate through the solar system and all the stars outside it. What does the sky look like from Vega or the Pleiades? Finally, you can experience these beautiful views for yourself.

Voyager 4's stellar database is a complete and comprehensive compendium of data on more than 2.5 million stars. View the components of binary stars such as Alpha Centauri, or the 'Double Double' in Lyra - orbiting each other over hundreds of years.

Using the program will not be as difficult as you might expect for this sort of application. Its tools are quite intuitive although you will have to try it a bit before being able to really enjoy the experience. That said, there are so many functions and options you can get lost! I liked the Solar Neighbourhood feature which allows you to select the distance in light-years and see all the stars discovered so far, and of course rotate them to better understand their spatial postition.

It's both a professional tool for researchers and students, and an effective way for teachers (or parents) to show their students how things really work out there. Especially in this field, a navigable 3D rendering of the Universe will be much more effective than pages and pages of text.

Discover the Universe in a fascinating way with Voyager 4. Especially recommended for winter nights, when it's too cold to go outside and watch the sky for shooting stars.

Languages:

English

Limitations:

Some features reduced or disabled

OS requirements for Voyager:

OS: Mac OS X

Pros

Photorealistic textured horizon display and stars
3D Galaxy rendering that you can navigate
Many features to discover
Solar system animations

Cons

No easy-to-use version for beginners

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From the publisher of Voyager

For more than fifteen years, Carina Software has been offering full-featured planetarium software used by amateur and professional astronomers, casual backyard stargazers, and teachers in college and high school classrooms. The Mac OS X version of Voyager 4 is a Universal Binary application, and will run natively on both Intel and PowerPC Macintosh computers. It features a completely rewritten graphics and computational engine able to reproduce astronomical phenomena over a million-year timespan. Voyager 4's object database includes every known planet, moon, asteroid, comet in the solar system; and gigabytes of stars, star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies from the latest professional astronomical catalogs. It can display the sky with unprecedented realism and accuracy. Voyager 4 includes our SkyPilot telescope control interface, and can drive most commercially-available computer controllable telescopes, such as the Celestron NexStar GPS and Meade LX-200 GPS.