Seeking Astronomy Software

[DEWLine]

I'd like to use it to virtually roam around our Galaxy. It should be able to play with the GAIA DR 2 data sets and work and play nicely with either Snow Leopard or Yosemite versions of OSX (preferably both, but I'll take what I can get).

Any suggestions?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Not that I know of but I imagine you'll need a hard drive to store comprehensive data about 130 million stars. (The approximate 10% of the 1.3 billion stars measured for which accurate parallax data is available.)

https://m.esa.int/About_Us/ESAC/Gaia_creates_richest_star_map_of_our_Galaxy_and_beyond

Of course, 130 million stars is less than 0.1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy but large parallax means they will usually be relatively nearby - within approximately a few kiloparsecs (a parsec is 3.26ly), according to this document:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.09376.pdf

If the second release is available, I might download the entire catalogue just so I can do some private research. I think I have a few terabytes of storage to spare.

http://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/

 

[Santaman]

https://www.redshift-live.com/ext/en/
maybe this is what you're looking for?

This entry has more alternatives and suggestions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift_(planetarium_software)

 

[DEWLine]

GAIA DR2 is indeed available.

 

[Johnny7oak]

I kind of think I had something like that with my telescope, but its probably windows xp in date. I wouldn't be able to part with it, but maybe I can think of the name. it had the function to link up to the telescope by rj45 port connection

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

https://www.redshift-live.com/ext/en/
maybe this is what you're looking for?

Seemingly so. According to the website, Redshift for Mac accesses Gaia data online:

“On the fly” download of the current Gaia Super-catalogue with one billion stars.

https://www.redshift-live.com/ext/en/shop/products/37437.html