Alternative Sky Chart options?

[34South]

I use SkySafari Pro on my IOS devices but Starry Night Pro Plus 8 on my MacBook Pro. I did end up purchasing SkySafari for OSX to be compatible with Observatory but prefer Starry Night's GUI on OSX. It would be great to be able to preferably link to the latter. Since both are produced by Simulation Curriculum, I cannot imagine this would be difficult or indeed challenging to implement.

[Sander Berents]

I always intended to support other applications, but I only own SkySafari 6 Pro myself. Originally SkySafari didn't support this, but Bill Tschumy made some enhancements specifically for this in response to my request, so Observatory would be able to have it display sky charts. He has since left Simulation Curriculum. Do you know if Starry Night has a way to control it programmatically? I know TheSkyX does. Would you be willing to test such feature for Starry Night?  Any volunteers for TheSkyX?

[34South]

Dear Sander, not sure if this is what you're asking but there is a hot key Cmd-U which brings up a box and which recalls the last coordinate system used and one can tab between RA and Dec fields (see attached). It does not appear that one can switch between coordinate system tabs using hotkeys. Would gladly beta test.

[Sander Berents]

I downloaded the latest manual and did not find anything about scripting. Its plugin API contains the sn_CentreWindowAtCoords call that may do what we need but that API hasn't been updated for 15 years, and having to write a plugin for this is a bit extreme. In the support forum I found a post about AppleScripts not working, with no response, and a request for programmatic control, also with no response. It would be great to support Starry Night in Observatory, but I don't think it is possible right now.

[fsantore]

I wold be a very willing TheSkyX tester.

[Sander Berents]

Great! I'll contact you later about this.