Planetarium Computer Software
Since the invention of the personal computer, the planetarium concept has been extended to include software that displays a realistic sky image. Not all astronomy software can be considered to be planetarium software. While there is no generally-accepted definition of the word planetarium in this context, planetarium software generally contains the following features at a minimum:
- A realistic sky image as seen from Earth
- The ability to display sky motions in real-time
- The ability to animate time changes backwards and forwards
Read more about this topic: List Of Planetariums
Famous quotes containing the words planetarium and/or computer:
“In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, “galaxy” is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)