SkyGazer

SkyGazer is a lightweight Windows application whose purpose is to help you view the sky from any place on Earth or in the solar system, explore the stars, star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies, as well as learn the names of the bright stars and watch the changing positions of the planets.

It comes packed with many dedicated parameters, so the layout may seem a bit overwhelming for rookies. You need to take some time and explore each built-in feature or consult the comprehensive help manual for making the most out of this utility.

There are several floating panels which provide information about the time, location, and display for helping you control the simulated time, observe a preferred location, and explore the items embedded in the sky chart window.

You can create and use as many sky chart windows as you need for displaying the sky at a particular time and location and viewing the stars, planets, constellation, horizon, and other elements.

SkyGazer gives you the possibility to zoom in or out of the sky, show the azimuth and altitude, as well as double-click on any area of the sky for getting information about the objects, such as name, translation, type, area, transits, and description (history and mythology, notable objects).

What’s more, you are allowed to lock an object, such as a planet, comet, asteroid, or a start for following its motion, set the location, date and time, as well as use the mouse and keyboard commands to let you control the display of the sky in the chart windows.

The time panel displays and controls the flow of time, and lets you drag the hands of the clock to change the time, choose to show the LMT (Local Mean Time) or UTC (Universal Time) on the clock, automatically update the front sky chart windows as your computer clock’s time changes, and synchronize sky chart windows to have the same simulated time.

SkyGazer enables you to show or hide the sun, planets, moon, asteroids, comets, spacecrafts, stars, constellation lines, figures, and boundaries, Messier objects, sky images, Milky Way, deep sky objects, coordinate grids, reference lines and points, labels, and natural sky background.

Other notable characteristics worth mentioning are represented by the possibility to export pictures of the sky to PICT, BMP, TIFF, or JPG file format, print data, simulate the Earth cycles over a past period of time and view the shift in constellations, observe the phases of the planets, and check the positions of the nearby stars in relation to the sun.

SkyGazer offers a decent feature package for helping you explore the space. It can be used as an education tool for introducing students to the world of astronomy.