GUIDE

This is the one and only planetarium program that works exceptionally well with Mel Bartels' scope.exe program. You press one key (G), while scope is operating  and initialized, to get the planetarium view of the object that your scope is pointing at. {If you are a beginner, you can open Guide and find a good initialization star first, then open scope and initialize} You can look around in Guide for an object to view, get information about the object you wish to see or anything else, press F and X and then Guide closes and scope opens back up. When Scope.exe opens, it automatically slews your telescope to the last object you were centered on in Guide
There are no comm ports to contend with, no IRQ's, no cables to yet another laptop or anything of the sort. This is a very simple program to learn to use. It won't take you hours of pouring over a manual to learn either.

We do realize that the program only comes on CD-ROM. We have a parallel port CD-ROM drive that will install the software on laptops that don't have a CD-ROM drive. This service is free to full system customers and available for a small fee for anyone else. There is a page on  the authors site that explains the procedure in detail.

Here are a few sample screen shots I took from the authors site with his permission.

As you can see from the screen shots,  this is no sub par planetarium program. This is a full featured program that has been around for a while and has seasoned a bit. Just like a fine wine.