sky trial software / shareware for mac

xSkyDesk is a sky simulation at your location on the Earth within your desktop.
The simulation accurately portrays the sky during the day and the stars at night. The main goal is the synchronicity between what you see outside on a clear day and the simulation. In this way, the Great Outdoors can be brought inside and seen through your computer. While experiencing the outdoors is preferable, most computer workers do not have the opportunity to even marginally experience the sky overhead.
xSkyDesk is the way to be connected to your environment.
Version restrictions:
- 10 day demo.
Enhancements:
- Universal binary
- You can now set a fixed view
- 9 times the number of stars: 87k stars
- Fades the main window.

SkyChart is an advanced planetarium program that accurately simulates and displays the sky as it appears in the present, or from thousands of years in the past or future. With SkyChart you can view the sky from any place on Earth, from any object in the solar system, or even from thousands of light years beyond it.
SkyChart is also a telescope control program, supporting all of the leading computer-controlled telescopes available on the market today. SkyChart lets you enjoy the benefits of computer-aided observing: see where the telescope is pointing on your computer screen, or slew the telescope to any object in the sky with a single click of the mouse.
Main features:
- Accurately reproduces eclipses, transits, and occultations - as seen not only from Earth, but also from any place in the solar system. Watch the Moon orbit the Earth as seen from another planet, or witness the passage of a comet through the solar system as if you were riding on the comet!
- Shows you the sky from beyond the solar system, and lets you watch the celestial scenery change as you move. View the constellations from hundreds or thousands of light years away!
- Animates the sky forward or backward in time over thousands of years. Watch the celestial poles precess; see the constellations shift as the stars move over the millenia.
- Supports leading computer-controlled telescopes from Meade, Celestron, and other manufacturers. See where the telescope is pointing on your computer screen; slew the telescope to any object in the sky with a single click of the mouse. SkyChart III even has a "red screen" mode to preserve your night vision when working at the telescope!
- Includes two fully-customizable object databases. The Standard database is installed on your hard drive and contains 400,000 stars, plus tens of thousands of star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. The Large database resides on the CD-ROM, and contains everything in the Standard database, plus over 19 million additional stars, and 1 million more galaxies. Import your own database files to add new comets, asteroids, stars, planets, or deep-sky objects. Any existing object in the database can be edited, even the constellations!
- Renders star images and planet surfaces in 32-bit color with data derived from NASA spacecraft imagery. Print high-resolution finder charts in black and white or color; or export images in many different file formats like BMP, GIF, JPEG, PICT, TIFF. Save animations as GIF files viewable in any web browser!
- Computes positions of the Sun, Moon, major planets, their moons, dozens of comets and asteroids to within milli-arcseconds of their values in the Astronomical Almanac. Investigate historical events like eclipses and conjunctions that happened centuries ago, and accurately reproduce what ancient peoples saw.
- Computes and displays the positions of Earth satellites from standard NASA/NORAD two-line element satellite orbit files using the full-precision SGP4/SDP4 satellite orbit models. Follow the International Space Station across the sky, or predict a satellite passage in front of the Moon.
Enhancements:
- This release brings the code base of the English-language version up to sync with the newly released Spanish-language version. A number of changes were made to support better internationalization/localization:
- The decimal-point character is now locale-specific; decimals are displayed as "," in European locales, and "." in North America. (The computers regional settings are used to determine the locale.) Decimal points in text import files and settings files are always assumed to be the US (".") decimal-point character, for consistency. [Note: this functionality is only present in the Windows version of SkyChart III; were still trying to make it work on Mac OS X.]
- All strings in data files, and settings descriptions in settings files, are converted to Windows Latin-1 encoding before being written to disk. This ensures that accented and other european-language characters will translate properly between Mac and Windows.
- A case-sensitive search for an object name is now sensitive to both case and diacritics (e.g. accents, umlauts, etc). When case is ignored, diacritics are also ignored - e.g. a search for "Jupiter" will also find "Jpiter", and a search for "Saturn" will also find "Sturn".
- In the chart legend, the full names of deep sky objects are being displayed, instead of abbreviations.
- In the "Object Info" window, a number of text strings and buttons were rearranged. The object type for the Sun is now displayed as "Star"; for the major planets as "Planet"; for moons as "Moon". The star type for single stars is now simply listed as "Star".
- For years outside 1600 - 2100 A.D., the program uses new expressions for the precession of the equinox provided by W. M. Owen of JPL. These new expressions should provide realistic results for a much wider interval of +/- 500,000 years from J2000. (The previous expressions "blew up" and displayed highly unrealistic results after roughly 10,000 years from J2000.) For the time period 1600 - 2100 A.D., the previous (IAU 1976) expressions for precession are still used.
- Previous versions of the Windows installer for SkyChart III installed a 16-bit version of the uninstall application (UnWise.exe). This update replaces it with the 32-bit version.
- Fixed a crash in the Mac OS X version that occurred when moving the mouse inside a progress-bar dialog.
- Removed timing code in the Mac OS X version that was causing a performance-profiling dialog to appear sporadically.
- The Mac OS X version of SkyChart III can now launch properly on Macs with 2.0 GB of RAM or more installed. The Mac OS X installer/updater application should no longer display a warning on Macs with more than 2.0 GB of RAM. (This warning can safely be ignored, however.)
- The Mac OS X version now has the main windows "close" button enabled; clicking it quites the application. The "Quit" menu command has moved from the File menu to the "SkyChart III" menu, for better conformance with Apples Mac OS X interface guidelines.

Let it snow! Plow your way through the blizzard.
Clearing each line will bring you closer to a clear sky.
Full version features new snowfall and level upgrades!
Enhancements:
- Translucent Template
- New Snowfall.

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

Eyes in the Skies includes 70+ live cameras from all over the state, with a slight emphasis on the city of Boulder.
Traffic cams, ski cams and points of interest.
Always changing, best viewed at sunset or dawn.
Two viewing sizes with a simple click of the mouse.
Enhancements
- Added 20 ski cams for winter viewing.

Starry Night Backyard ESD 3.1.2 is a smart and useful astronomy software that lets you see the sky from anywhere on Earth, any solar system body, or any location up to 20,000 light-years away. View 1,000,000 stars along with 110 deep-space objects such as galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae. Navigate through space for otherworldly views of eclipses and other rare cosmic events. Click Go There and travel to the planet, moon, or star of your choice. You can even e-mail your latest night sky discoveries to others with QuickTime movies.

Serial ToolKit is a 4th Dimension plug-in which provides complete access to the serial port, a vast improvement over the native functionality available in 4Ds programming language.
Serial ToolKit contains a dozen commands to completely manage local serial ports, including open connections, closing connections, port configuration, send and receiving data, and retrieving serial port parameter and configuration infomations.
Main features:
- get a list of available serial ports (including additional serial ports added by PCI or Nubus cards, USB adapters and PCMCIA cards);
- open and configure a serial port (speed, parity, hand-shake, etc);
- change the serial port buffer size;
- send and receive information.
Enhancements:
- Bug fix in STK_GetBuf in the MacOS version which was not returning a valid value (usually 0).