Newton Software
I bought an Apple Newton Messagepad 2000 in 1997 and fell in love with it immediately. I started writing all sorts of software for it hoping to capture the World's imagination with great programs for the Newton. Alas it was not to be as Apple soon decided to discontinue the product.
Now months later I have decided to finish as many of those programs as I can and make them available to the Newton community. I love all things scientific so one of my projects is a planetarium simulator for the Newton. It's a bit rough at the moment, but I am working on it. I will also get a .sit version for Mac users.
Download Sky Guide 56kb.
Please keep in mind that SkyGuide is still in beta so there are bugs, but nothing destructive as far as I know.
Stop Press I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the Newton web site has been shut down. This was the repository of all of the Newton development tools and information from Apple. The good news is that most of the stuff can still be downloaded from their FTP site at ftp://ftp.apple.com/devworld/Newton_Development/
This is a screen shot of SkyGuide
Instructions
I haven't put together a proper instruction manual so here are a few simple directions.
- You need a Newton MP2X00 to run this. If I get enough requests I'll consider writing a version for earlier Newtons.
- At the moment SkyGuide picks up the time and location on Earth from your current location according to the Newton.
- The brighter line represents the horizon and yes, you can see through the Earth.
- The dimmer lines represent Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (Dec)
- Stars down to magnitude 4 are displayed.
- The Planets, Sun and Moon are represented by small circles identfied by a three letter abbreviation. The are not to scale.
- On the lower left the following information is displayed.
- Viewing location on the Earth in longitude and latitude
- Local Mean Time (Time according to your longitude)
- Greenwich Mean Time
- Local Siderial Time
- The + and - buttons zoom in and out. The number between the buttons represents the zoom factor on an arbitary scale. The most useful zoom factor for locating objects is probably 500.
- The N button is used to refresh the display according to the current time.
- The arrows allow you to pan across the sky, however it is probably faster to simply click on the point of the sky where you want the display to be centred.
- The numbers below represent the direction you should be facing to see what the Newton is showing you in the real sky. Sometimes there are 2 sets of numbers, one of these will usually be correct. I'm still working on this.
The first number is the azmuith, or in other words the direction you should be facing taking North as 0 degrees.
The second number is the elevation, or the angle from the horizon you should tilt your gaze.
- The i button in the menu has an about box. If you feel the urge then send money to the address supplied.
- The Direction menu sets the viewing direction.
- North, South, East and West are pretty self evident.
- Zenith will look directly overhead.
- Horizon will look at the horizon.
- Nadir will look at you feet.
- Custom doesn't work properly at the moment.
- The View menu controls what items are rendered in the display. This can be used to speed up the program.
- RA Dec will display or hide lines of RA and Dec
- Horizon will display or hide the horizon line
- Planets will display or hide the Planets, Sun and Moon
- Stars will display or hide the stars
That's it, I hope you'll enjoy using the program and take the time to let me know what you think.
I should also give a special thanks to Paul Schlyter for this excellent web site Computing Planetary Positions (Updated Link) from which I obtained some of the algorithms for this program.
Known bugs
- Right Ascension and Declination Lines not rendered properly when looking directly at the poles.
- Magnification doesn't make any sense
- Azmuith and Elevation figures are a bit messy.
Email me at jimmyh@au1.ibm.com
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