Yes, it was useful for quick “what’s up” checks, but how about for locating objects? Not So Much.

Which is why I continued to use the last and greatest Skyglobe, version 3.6, till my old Windows XP Toshiba laptop died a few weeks back. Need to know what was up? Click on its icon in the Windows 3.1 window where I had it permanently stationed on my desktop, and I had the sky on my screen in the wink of an eye. Running on my 486, this little DOS application (what came before Winders, younguns) was blazingly fast. It was so purty I just had to turn off the lights and admire all them stars (the whole Yale Bright Star catalog for god’s sake!) and the shimmering blue band of the Milky Way. It was a long, long way from the blocky graphics (if you could even call them that) of Sky Travel. Astronomy software for this wonder-machine? A little program I’d stumbled across at Books-a-Million, Skyglobe.Īs I’ve said before, I was gobsmacked by Skyglobe, which impressed me as none of the (few) astronomy programs I’d used before had.

I had finally abandoned my beloved Commodore 64 Home Computer and my very first astro-ware, Sky Travel, for the greener pastures of a genu-wine IBM 486 with a VGA video card and Windows 3.1. Hokay, where was we? When we last left astronomy-software-crazy old Uncle Rod (not so old, then) it was 1993.

Skyglobe for vista