With all this renewed activity around Mars, and George W. Lightyear's decision to send humans there, you might, like us, be taking a more active interest in the night sky. Red Shift 5, which was launched towards the end of last year, could help enhance that interest and tell you a lot of things you didn't know.

It's an astronomy package, which is handy for a start, since the UK's skies are increasingly being blighted with light pollution, making it hard to make out anything dimmer than the Pleiades cluster, let alone Jupiter's moons. Which is a shame, because even a powerful pair of binoculars could potentially show you sights that are many millions of miles away.

But for those of us stuck with the orange glow of sodium street lighting, the PC does an admirable job of replacing optical instruments. In the case of Red Shift 5 (red shift is used as a measurement of astronomical distance, because the light from far distance stars is Doppler shifted towards the red end of the spectrum... I'm boring you, aren't I?), it does far more than that.

For starters, you can choose your vantage point. That may be a city on the Earth (or any longitude/latitude co-ordinates), or the surface of a planet, moon, comet and so on. You can change time, too, from over 4,000 years BC to nearly 10,000 years AD. Once that's done, you can locate any one of over 70,000 deep space objects, including all the above plus galaxies, nebulae, interstellar gas clouds and more.

All fascinating stuff, but not much help if you don't know what you're looking at. Here Red Shift helps out, with detailed information about many heavenly objects. This information is supplemented by a fantastic photo gallery, including images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Many of these are beautiful, especially those of galactic clusters and nebulae.

Also in the package is a useful dictionary of astronomical terms, plus a diary of events (planetary alignments, eclipses and suchlike) related to your time and location, so you can plan when to venture outside and look upwards.

Problems? We found the animation - aside from the pre-rendered movies - to be rather sluggish at times. This gave us the impression that the rendering engine isn't as slick as the one in the Starry Night series of titles. But if you have a suitably nippy PC this shouldn't trouble you too much, and you'll get to see Saturn's moons dancing around its rings in smooth detail.

Likewise, the 'zoom towards objects' feature is done better by Starry Night Pro, but these are really frills. What will matter to amateur astronomers is the breadth of content, which is vast. Spend a few hours flitting from planet to comet to galaxy to star and you'll get a whole new perspective on the night sky.

Verdict
Astronomy is a fascinating science and can be an equally fascinating hobby; and a humbling one, for that matter, when you realise just how tiny the Earth is in comparison with the rest of the universe. Red Shift 5 lets you discover all this from the comfort of your PC, and is far more enlightening than sitting in a cold field waiting for the clouds to clear on a winter's night.

Company: Maris Multimedia

Contact: 01889 570156

Tags: hubble space telescope redshift pleiades earth astronomy large magellanic cloud tarantula nebula solar mass