There are also spaceflights for Yuri Gagarin (first human to orbit our planet in 1961), Apollo 13 (ill-fated and near disasterous trip to the moon in 1969), Voyager 2 (deep space probe launched in 1977), Galileo (Jupiter mission – launched in 1989 and sent into Jupiter atmosphere in 2003), the Mars Express, and the MER Opportunity and Spirit missions. The impacts were clear and RedShift has some of the images of those impacts. I then ran the tour ‘Guided Tours/The Essentials/A comet plunges to its death’ which is a re-enactment of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which broke up and the chunks plunged into the atmosphere of Jupiter. I would’ve liked to see some mention that the Cassini mission has been extended far beyond the planned life of the mission – this is interesting information and relevant to astronomy students. This was an important mission as we took many great pictures of Saturn and the moon Titan. It made several near planet passes to gain speed: twice by Venus, once by Earth, and once by Jupiter (mostly for course correction than for speed) before arriving at Saturn. The probe had a complicated route to Saturn. The next tour I checked out was Cassini, which was interesting as it was a 6 part tour which shows each phase of the complex flight the probe took. I took the Mars tour and liked the quality of the image of the surface of Mars: Next, I checked out some of the space flight tours. This moon is closer to Jupiter, but the radiation levels there may be higher than on a moon that is further away. This moon is bigger than Mercury, and it was the site of Robert Heinlein’s ‘Farmer in the Sky’ science fiction story about future colonizing efforts of humanity. Ganymede – probably my favorite Jupiter moon. Callisto is further away from Jupiter, so the closer and larger moon might be a better landing site. Only comment – the text appears center-justified.Ĭallisto – one of the larger moons of Jupiter, Callisto has been viewed as a potential landing site for a Jupiter system exploratory mission. I like the perspective as the orbits are clear and the information (in the box at the top right of the screen) was interesting. This is the screen shot I took using RedShift 7, which shows Jupiter and 5 of the largest moons. Now I saw a nice improvement when I took the tour of the 5 main Jupiter moons. I poked around and found a few options that looked like they could help (‘Extras/Enable OpenGL’, ‘View/Surface Features/Planets’ and ‘View/Surface Features/Moon’), so I enabled them, then restarted the software and took a few additional guided tours. The tours were good, but the quality of the planets and moons was not what I expected. Next I decided to take some of the many guided tours included with the software. I checked out all of the tabs to learn how to use the software. First of all I like the Getting Started screen: The software was installed in the C:\Program Files\Maris Technologies folder. No problems during either phase of this process. I downloaded and installed the product on the Windows XP partition of my 2.26 GHz dual core Intel processor Macbook (~ 14 months old) which has a 250 GB hard drive and 2 GB RAM. I contacted the product vendor and they were happy to provide a download of the software to evaluate, so let’s get started with the evaluation. We’ve both used a lot of commercial and open source products for different operating systems – some which we cover on this site (Starry Night Pro, Voyager, etc) – and since Ted reviewed RedShift for the iPhone/iPad, we felt I should take a look at the version of the product for Windows: RedShift 7 Advanced. Ted Bade and I are both amateur astronomers. By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved.
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