XEphem

XEphem project is a scientific-grade interactive astronomical ephemeris package.

Features:

• computes heliocentric, geocentric and topocentric information for all objects;
• has built-in support for all planets; the moons of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Earth; central meridian longitude of Mars and Jupiter; Saturn's rings; and Jupiter's Great Red Spot;
• allows user-defined objects including stars, deepsky objects, asteroids, comets and Earth satellites.
• provides special efficient handling of large catalogs including Tycho, Hipparcos, GSC.
• displays data in configurable tabular formats in conjunction with several interactive graphical views;
• displays a night-at-a-glance 24 hour graphic showing when any selected objects are up;
• displays 3-D stereo Solar System views that are particularly well suited for visualizing comet trajectories;
• quickly finds all close pairs of objects in the sky;
• sorts and prints all catalogs with very flexible criteria for creating custom observing lists;
• creates plots of any pairs of all data fields throughout the program;
• downloads and displays AAVSO light curves directly online;
• downloads current asteroid and comets ephemerides from Lowell Observatory and Minor Planet Center;
• downloads timely Earth satellite orbital TLE parameters;
• plots true binary system orbits;
• downloads Digitized Sky Survey FITS files from STScI or ESO;
• displays seti@home client progress and plots position being processed on Sky View map;
• provides a handy coordinates spreadsheet for converting among equatorial, ecliptic, horizon and galactic frames ;
• displays live SOHO images of the Sun;
• includes a compiler for entering and solving user-written functions using any data fields;
• serves as the control point for GOTO telescopes such as Meade LX200 or other external applications;
• displays FITS files images overlaid with database symbols and other graphical information;
• performs automatic star pattern matching to automatically solve for World Coordinate System on any image;
• performs 1-click 2D Gaussian relative and absolute photometry;
• defines and saves any number of Eyepieces to use in sky maps;
• captures, displays and clips to any number of local horizon profiles;
• stores sets of all Sky View options in history sets for easy playback later;
• prints using high quality Postscript;
• allows you to assign any number of objects as Favorites for special fast access throughout the program, and makes them available even when their original databases are no longer loaded;
• provides an extensible image gallery initialized with over 300 beautiful and informative color images of deep sky objects;
• provides an observing logbook which is automatically filled in with observing circumstances, with searching on most fields;
• displays magnetic deviation for any location.