Enjoyable

Its easy to look past the typical ease-of-use troubles if you care enough about this stuff.

Two things would make this a better program. First, a function to do the "3d flight" thing to another object just by clicking on it. If youre centered on Earth and you want to center on Beta Pictoris or something, you can zoom your view in that direction, but its still "centered" on Earth. Click and drag is useless at that point because your target of interest isnt centered. If I want to "go" there, I have to do a search for the thing Im already looking at, just to center on it. A button for "going" to the selected object would vastly improve navigation.

Second, a way to really fly around. The description of the entire app is that you get to fly around, but thats not functionally true. You can zoom in and out (resulting in pretty wacky FOV angles), but you cant manually go anywhere. Again, youre stuck going to the giant search thing and looking up a name (sometimes abbreviated beyond the obvious full words, like 55 Cancri is just 55 Cnc, which makes sense in hindsight, but not when youre looking at a blank list of results for "Cancri" or even "Cancer"). Arrow keys or something would be helpful here, so that I can fly around at whatever scale my zoom is showing me.

Otherwise, Im happy to own the software, and I look forward to using it more.

tiliv about Redshift - Astronomy