Voyager

Voyager is an advanced software application whose purpose is to help you explore the earth and solar system from the comfort of your desktop. It comes packed with a large database of nebulae, clusters, and galaxies.

Interacting with the GUI

The program offers support for a multitude of dedicated parameters so be prepared to invest some of your time in order to understand how to control them. A comprehensive help manual is included in the package in case you need extra help with the configuration settings.
You are allowed to set up your startup location, create and use as many sky chart windows as you need (each panel reveals the sky at a particular time and location, and it may show stars, planets, constellations, or horizon), as well as navigate the sky using your keyboard or mouse.

Time-related and location settings

Voyager gives you the possibility to travel back in time or view future aspects. You can make use of the built-in time controls in order to start or stop a simulation, go to the next or previous day, and reveal the current date and time.
You can also drag the hands of the integrated analogue clock in order to change the time. As you alter the time, you can view how the sky darkens and lightens, and how the sun, moon, planets, and stars rise and set.
What’s more, you are allowed to make use of a map in order to change your location and set up a new location in the solar system by specifying a reference object, such as a planet, moon, comet, asteroid, or spacecraft.
Other important features worth being mentioned enable you to travel on a path around any nearby star and display specific objects, such as sun, planets, moon, asteroids, comets, spacecraft, stars, constellation lines, Milky Way, deep-sky objects, Messier objects, and variable stars. You can also control a telescope, show or hide its position in the sky chart, and rotate the telescope to different angles.

Detailed information about various objects

You may print various pieces of information, get the physical properties of an object, check out the current orbital elements for an object, preview images of planets, comets, nebulae, clusters, and galaxies, view the objects as symbols in the sky, and reveal the names of all planets/objects in the front sky chart.
What’s more, you can make the app display the orbit of each planet or other object, celestial coordinates of the mouse in the sky chart window, or a magnified view of the sky chart window near the mouse position
You may prints all objects on the observing list, save the frames of any animation as a QuickTime movie, make use of different projection modes (e.g. gnomic, orthographic, stereographic) to display the sky, change the orientation of the sky chart, export the sky chart as an image file (BMP, JPG, TIFF), save planet ephemeris data to plain text file format, and import deep sky, satellite, asteroid, and comet info from plain text files.

A powerful astronomical viewer

All in all, Voyager comes bundled with professional tools and offers detailed information for helping you view and analyze astronomical objects, and is suitable especially for advanced users.