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LiveSky unites the power and ease-of-use of Starry Night with the vast sea of information on the Internet. With LiveSky, you can easily link from any star, planet, or other celestial object to any place on the Internet or your local hard drive. LiveSky allows you to search the LiveSky web site for information concerning any object you can select in Starry Night. The LiveSky site has hundreds of links to the best astronomical sites around the world! In addition you can add your own custom bookmarks to any of the millions objects in Starry Night. Bookmarks can take the form of URLs such as http://www.cnn.com/ or email address such as mailto:contact@starrynight.com. On the Macintosh you can also bookmark with text notes (such as observation or research notes), or with local files such as pictures, folders, word processing documents, help files, lesson files, etc. With LiveSky you can also zoom into a small region of space and call on the Digitized Sky Survey by the Space Science Institute to bring you an incredible view of the patch of sky you are looking at. See pictures of thousands of galaxies, nebulae and clusters by using this powerful tool!
LiveSky Bookmarks Sienna's LiveSky Internet site contains many links to information about different objects in the sky. Example: Linking from the moon to a web page about the moon
The LiveSky bookmark feature is active for every object in Starry Night. Some objects will have lots of data, but for many stars and dim objects the LiveSky site may not have any specific information.
Custom Bookmarks You can add your own web page and email bookmarks to any object in Starry Night. On the Macintosh you can also add local files such as pictures and text notes. Example: Add your own web page bookmark to the moon. The Internet is so vast that there is no way that the LiveSky web site can link to all of the possible sites that might be relevant for the moon. With this feature you can link you own favorite web pages to the moon
If you try the LiveSky menu once more, you will see that it now contains a bookmark to the page currently running on your browser.
Example: Add an email address to the moon Let's pretend that you have a certain friend, say his name is Maury. For some reason, every time you think about Maury the moon pops into your head. (Perhaps Maury is a night owl, or he is connected with a moon observation project, or something). Starry Night with LiveSky makes it easy for you add Maury's email address to the moon.
If you now select the moon, you can use the LiveSky menu to email Maury. When you try this, your favorite email application should start up and open up a letter to Maury with the address already filled in and ready to go.
After you have made several bookmarks you may lose track of where they all are. Use this feature to quickly find them. Select "Find" from the Edit menu and search for the name or a few letters of the name of the bookmark you are looking for. Starry Night will center the object that contains the bookmark. For example if you have put Maury's email address on the moon, just do a find in Starry Night for "Maury" and Starry Night will center the moon. Adding references to local files using drag and drop (Macintosh only) You can add references to files on your hard disk to Starry Night. For example, you might have a picture of Maury on your hard drive that you would like to add to the moon. You can do this by simply dragging the picture file from the finder into Starry Night and onto the moon. Now when you go to the LiveSky menu with the moon selected, you will notice that you can now open the picture of Maury by selecting it from the menu. You can drag in word processing documents, folders, etc.-- pretty well anything you can make an alias out of. Adding text notes to any object (Macintosh only) You can also add notes to any object by using the drag and drop mechanism. Type a note in SimpleText or any other word processor that supports Drag and Drop. Next, select all of the text in your note and drag it into the Starry Night window. Let the text drop on the object you wish to add the note to. LiveSky allows you to edit and view the note. To make changes to the title or contents use the "Edit Bookmarks" command in the LiveSky menu.
Using the Digitized Sky Survey With LiveSky you can connect to the Digitized Sky Survey. Starry Night shows over 15 million celestial object, but this is only a tiny fraction of the stars and objects that can be seen from Earth using telescopes. On the Internet here is a very large database, called the Digitized Sky Survey by the Space Telescope Science Institute. This survey contains large, high resolution pictures of the entire night sky. The database is so large that it is distributed on a few hundred CD-ROMs. Starry Night makes it easy to get a look at the thousands of galaxies, nebulae and other astronomical phenomena that are contained in this database. There is a online form that you can fill out in order to request that a picture of the sky be sent to your browser. Starry Night makes this process considerably easier. Example: viewing the horsehead nebula using LiveSky. Starry Night comes with many fine photos of celestial objects, but a picture of the horsehead nebula is not included on the CD-ROM. With LiveSky, we can use the Digitized Sky Survey to load a picture of the horsehead nebula onto your browser.
Getting a picture from the Digitized Sky Survey to your browser can take up to a few minutes, so you have to be patient. The reason for the delay is that the Digitized Sky Survey's computer has to assemble your request into a picture from its extensive database. One way to explore with the Digitized Sky Survey is to turn on the NGC/IC objects and look for an interesting cluster of galaxies. Zoom in on a promising cluster and then ask for the Digital Sky Survey image for a detailed view. Note: Select Options>NGC/IC Objects from the Settings menu and turn off the "Limit by Magnitude Criteria" checkbox so that all of the galaxies are always showing.
Markers and Editing Settings Choose LiveSky Settings from the LiveSky menu. From here you can turn on or off special markers that show which objects in the sky you have attached bookmarks to. You can also used to turn off the ability to edit the Bookmarks. This might be useful in a classroom environment.
Exporting bookmarks You can turn your collection of LiveSky web site bookmarks into a list in HTML format. The resulting document can be opened with a browser such as Netscape. This feature is handy if you want to make a personal web page with all of your favorite links.
Using Contextual Menus Select an object in the sky, and right-click with the mouse (Windows) or hold the mouse button down (Macintosh). A popup menu listing several options will appear. You can use this menu as a shortcut to LiveSky's features.
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