Introducing Deep-Sky Planner 8

Introducing the latest version of award winning Deep-Sky Planner.
Observe and image more in less time.™

Awards

Deep-Sky Planner 8 is here! Version 8 brings updated and expanded professional catalog data to you and lots of new features. Deep-Sky Planner 8 makes your imaging and visual observing faster, easier and more accurate.

You can watch the brief introduction video below that highlights some of the new features, or you can read read about them further below. There is also more information on the Product Info page.

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Data

Catalog data have been expanded and updated.
- There are now over 1.6 million objects in the database and nearly 1.2 million names and cross references to these objects.
- Revised Flat Galaxy Catalogue and the Vorontsov-Velyaminov Interacting Galaxies Catalogue have been added to the reference database.
- IAU star names, Flamsteed numbers and Bayer designations have been updated in the reference database.
- The following catalogs have been updated: WDS, PGC, NGC and IC catalogs. The NGC/IC catalogs are taken from the latest Revised NGC/IC from Dr. Wolfgang Steinicke. This is probably the most updated and corrected edition of the NGC/IC available today. Finally, many corrections have been made to the database.
- A cross reference from GGC (Catalog of Galactic Globular Clusters, Monella, 1985) to GCl (Star Clusters & Associations II. Globular Clusters, Ruprecht+, 1981) has been added.
- A cross reference from BOCL (Optically visible open clusters and Candidates, Dias+, 2015) to OCl (Star Clusters/Associations. III. Open Clusters, Ruprecht+, 1983) has been added.
Support for downloading and storing orbital elements has been expanded to include asteroid and comet elements from NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics group and each of 3 categories of elements from MPCORB. These categories include numbered asteroids, unnumbered asteroids and unnumbered and unperturbed asteroids. These new datasets are large; thus, downloading them is multi-threaded.

Community

New support has been added for browsing and downloading observing plans and equipment lists from the Deep-Sky Planner Community on the Knightware website. There are hundreds of plans and new ones are added weekly. Equipment lists are updated less frequently.

Charting

Show Chart support has been added for Stellarium.
Show Chart remains for Cartes du Ciel 3+, Redshift 7+, Starry Night 6+, TheSky6 Serious+, TheSkyX Pro. Support for more recent versions remains.

User Interface

Light Style

Dark Style

New styling of the user interface is available, including a dark style.
Support for high resolution displays, like 4k monitors with scaling > 125% has been added throughout the product.
The multi-document window style of user interface has been replaced with a multi-tab style. You can still have multiple documents open and you can still copy and paste objects from document to document.
Please see this video showing the new copy & paste technique

Printing

Print to Fit has been added - the report text is adjusted to fill the width of a page in either portrait or landscape orientation.
Color printing is supported
Print to PDF has been added added

Documents

Exporting observing plans has been streamlined. Plans can be exported to several applications and devices:
- Imaging software
  - ACP Observatory Control software
  - APT (Astro Photography Tool) target list
  - NINA (Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy)
  - SGP (Sequence Generator Pro) target list
- Planetarium software
  - Cartes du Ciel
  - SkySafari
- Devices
  - Argo Navis
  - Nexus DSC
  - Sky Commander

Deep-Sky Planner 8 is backward compatible with version 7 documents. Deep-Sky Planner 8 observing plans are compatible with Deep-Sky Planner Mobile Edition.
Observing Log information can be moved from version 7 to version 8 by using Backup / Restore.

Logging

Support has been added for multiple images attached to an observation.
Support has been added for multiple media files attached to an observation.
Notes about various equipment and observers can be added in their respective browsers.

System

The Deep-Sky Planner installer can copy its interoperation plug-ins for Starry Night Pro/Pro Plus and Stellarium if they are installed in their default locations. The plug-ins can also be installed later as described here for Starry Night and here for Stellarium.
License activation can now be done online or by email.