When I was a child, one of my prized possessions was a star finder, bought on an excursion to New York’s Hayden Planetarium. At first glance, Voyager might seem like a computerized descendant of those simple cardboard disks, but it’s really more closely related to the planetarium I visited than to the star finder I took home.
WHAT IT IS The core of Voyager is a 14,000-object database, which includes 9,100 stars (including 1,600 binary and 160 variable stars); 3,000 deep-space objects (galaxies, clusters, and nebulas); 88 constellation outlines; the nine known planets of our Solar System; and the major moons of Jupiter.
The sky can be displayed as a star chart, a celestial sphere, or a view from any place on earth. Viewing locations may be entered as longitude and latitude or from any of 135 major cities. You aren’t earthbound, though. Voyager also lets you view the universe from any planet or from any fixed location within a range of 100 astronomical units (1 astronomical unit = 93 million miles, the mean distance from Earth to the Sun) — yes, even outside the Solar System. And Voyager is just as flexible with time. It can show you the firmament at any date from 1000 B.C, to A.D, 4000.
Click on any object, and Voyager pops open a data box. For example, star data includes name, Yale number, type, distance. magnitude, location coordinates, and more. The program also incorporates a search routine that locales objects by name, number, or descriptive adjective.
Voyager is chock-full of features — too many to detail here. It displays the outlines and names of constellations, such as the Southern Cross. It denotes Messier objects as well as binary and variable stars. It allows adjustment of magnitude (brightness) limits to control the number of objects displayed. It rotates the sky at a variety of rates. It can track the planets, showing their orbital paths with dot trails.
It can display an orrery view (from above) of the Solar System. And it even permits you to define the orbit of a new object, such as a newly discovered comet.
Voyager comes with a selection of interesting astronomical phenomena (eclipses, planetary occupations, and some famous comets) ready to be loaded. It can save your settings for later use and output sky charts (use the White Sky option) on standard printers. Printed charts are automatically stamped with identification data.
HOW IT WORKS Voyager is fast, it doesn’t keep you waiting for information, and it moves you across the galaxy in warp drive. It's also stable. In Finder or MultiFinder, the program is as dependable as Halley’s comet. Improvement? How about the ability to make your viewing location the startup default. Currently, you must save your settings and launch with that file. Picky? Well there isn't much to complain about.
Voyager is billed as “the interactive desktop planetarium,” but that's only half of its potential. At the trade show where I first saw it, Voyager was interfaced to a good-sized motorized reflector telescope. When an object on the screen was clicked on, the telescope moved to the coordinates of the target. With the proper hardware interface (check with Carina Software), the Voyager database can serve as the foundation of an automated observatory—astronomy departments, take note.
If you have any interest in astronomy or simply wish to have the universe in your Mac, buy this program. Voyager will never replace the experience of shivering in the darkness beneath a canopy of stars, nor will it match the theatricality of a real planetarium — but it delivers an unprecedented amount of astronomical information at an incredibly low price, and that’s no small feat.
Voyager is so good that it may even pry some users away from their Macs and into the nearest planetarium. Voyager will not only assist the current generation of astronomers but may also inspire the next.
Martinez, Carlos. (September 1989). Voyager. MacUser. (pg. 89).