Sky & Telescope - August 2021 - 69

quarter of a century? A visit to Knightware's
website reveals an impressive
list of additions and improvements to
this program, including an expanded
and improved database of 1.6 million
objects, support for 4K monitors,
an improved tool to download orbital
elements of asteroids and comets, and
support for the freeware planetarium
program Stellarium.
The most interesting addition for me
was the inclusion of Stellarium in the
list of planetarium programs Deep Sky
Planner 8 works with. DSP has never
had built-in star charts of its own, but
rather it links to various planetarium
programs to create them. Click on an
object in DSP's observing plan and a
star chart displays just as if the program
had a charting engine of its own.
While Deep Sky Planner 8 is available
on a CD, in these days of broadband
internet, few will be interested in paying
more for physical media, opting
instead for a digital download.
Installation and
Confi guration
After running the installation app, you
launch DSP 8 by clicking the attractive
icon placed on your computer's desktop,
but if you're using the program for the
fi rst time, I advise against that. Instead,
check the Windows Start menu entry for
Deep Sky Planner 8. Expanding that will
reveal a user's guide in pdf format. It's
a good idea to read it or at least have it
available for reference before proceeding.
Once the program is opened, what
appears at fi rst is somewhat underwhelming:
a blank
expanse of screen real
estate with a Windows
menu bar at the top
along with a row of icons.
Never fear - it's easy to
fi ll the screen with objects
and images. First, however,
it's necessary to do
some confi guring.
Since this is an astronomy
program, the most
important confi guration
task is entering your latitude,
longitude, and time
zone. Without that information,
DSP 8 won't be
able to determine what's
visible at a given time and
date. Fortunately, the software presents
an extensive list of cities and towns to
choose from in the Location Manager
section of the Options menu.
There's more to be done, of course,
like building a list of telescopes, eyepieces,
and other equipment so those
things can be easily entered when
recording your observations in DSP 8's
logbook. However, after time and location
are set, Deep Sky Planner 8 is ready
for basic use. Note that if you are a Deep
Sky Planner 7 user, you can conveniently
back up that program's settings, equipment
inventory, images, and other items
and use Restore in DSP 8's File menu to
load them into the new program.
Building Plans
Even after confi guration, the screen
remains blank - you still have to put
Top: It's easy to set search parameters for
retrieving objects from the internal databases
with the Search Document tool. Bottom: Nearly
600 ready-made observing plans are available
for download from Knightware's website.
an observing plan together. There are
two ways to do that: by downloading a
ready-made plan from Knightware, or
by building one of your own.
An extensive library of nearly 600
plans is available and is accessed
through the Community menu. Downloading
even large plans was so quick
that I fi rst thought something was
wrong. The program took fi ve seconds
to fetch the entire Herschel 400 list!
Once you know how, building your
own plan is simplicity itself, though I
had a little trouble with that at fi rst. To
create a plan, choose New Observing
Plan in the File menu and a blank plan
Left: Users can copy observing targets from the Search Document to a new observing plan using the Ctrl+C keys to copy and Ctrl+V to paste.
Right: The most popular planetarium programs can be linked to Deep Sky Planner 8 to provide star charts for your observing plans.
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Sky & Telescope - August 2021

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