Home Planet

Home Up Charles Messier Marathon Dates How to Marathon Astro History Observatory Logs - Programs Messier's Catalogue Nasa TV Links and Info Objects by number Astro Posters!

 

Here you can download FREE John Walkers 

software to map the night sky to use on your home computer!

These are designed to work with Windows 95, 98 or NT, not Windows 3.1.

There are three "versions".

"Lite" program, "Full" program, and "Upgrade" to full from lite.

Home Planet Release 3.1 is supplied in two editions. The "Lite" edition is intended for users who wish to evaluate the program and for casual users. It includes all of the functionality described above and has no accuracy or feature limitations, but in order to reduce download time and to be able to fit on a single 1.4 megabyte diskette, contains smaller databases (for example, only the brightest 7000 stars instead of 256,000, and a 720×360 pixel map of the Earth rather than one with twice that resolution. The Lite edition does not include the collection of images of astronomical objects present in the full version. The Lite edition is less than 1.5 megabytes in size.

The "Full" version of Home Planet includes everything in the Lite edition, plus the larger databases, images, and sound files, which increase the size of the download to more than 7 megabytes--more than many people are comfortable downloading on dial-up connections. If you've downloaded the Lite edition and later wish to upgrade to the Full package, there is a Home Planet upgrade kit available which contains only the components of the Full package omitted from the Lite edition.

 

Download "Lite" now!

Download "Full" now!

Download "Upgrade" now!

Installation instructions

Installing Home Planet

At the risk of being repetitious, I'll give separate instructions for installing both Lite and Full editions, as well as the Upgrade Pack.

Installing Home Planet Lite

You will have downloaded a "zip" compressed archive named hp3lite.zip. Create a directory for Home Planet (for example C:\HPLANET) and extract the files from the archive into it with PKUNZIP or a compatible extractor program. Be sure to specify the option which preserves directory structure in the archive. If you're using PKUNZIP from the MS-DOS prompt, you might install Home Planet with the commands:

 

    MKDIR C:\HPLANET
    CD C:\HPLANET
    PKUNZIP -D HP3LITE.ZIP

Once Home Planet is installed, you can launch the application simply by typing HPLANET from the MS-DOS prompt while in its directory, or by using the Run item on the Start menu and entering C:\HPLANET\HPLANET as the program name. Obviously, if you used a different drive or directory name instead of "C:\HPLANET", you would enter that name. For convenience, create a shortcut icon that points to Home Planet, and you'll be able to launch Home Planet simply by double clicking it.

Installing Home Planet Full

You will have downloaded a "zip" compressed archive named hp3full.zip. Create a directory for Home Planet (for example C:\HPLANET) and extract the files from the archive into it with PKUNZIP or a compatible extractor program. Be sure to specify the option which preserves directory structure in the archive. If you're using PKUNZIP from the MS-DOS prompt, you might install Home Planet with the commands:

 

    MKDIR C:\HPLANET
    CD C:\HPLANET
    PKUNZIP -D HP3FULL.ZIP

Once Home Planet is installed, you can launch the application simply by typing HPLANET from the MS-DOS prompt while in its directory, or by using the Run item on the Start menu and entering C:\HPLANET\HPLANET as the program name. Obviously, if you used a different drive or directory name instead of "C:\HPLANET", you would enter that name. For convenience, create a shortcut icon that points to Home Planet, and you'll be able to launch Home Planet simply by double clicking it.

Installing Home Planet Upgrade

If you have already installed Home Planet Lite and wish to add the larger databases and images of the Full edition, you can download the Upgrade pack, which is supplied as a "zip" compressed archive named hp3upg.zip. Navigate to the directory in which you previously installed Home Planet Lite (for example C:\HPLANET) and extract the files from the hp3upg.zip archive into it with PKUNZIP or a compatible extractor program. If asked whether you want to overwrite existing files in the directory, answer "Yes" to all such queries (the upgrade pack replaces several DLLs and text databases furnished with the Lite edition with larger and more comprehensive replacements from the Full package). Be sure to specify the option which preserves directory structure in the archive. If you're using PKUNZIP from the MS-DOS prompt, you might install the upgrade pack with the commands:

 

    CD C:\HPLANET
    PKUNZIP -DO HP3UPG.ZIP

(The "O" option on PKUNZIP instructs it to replace existing files from the Lite edition with their counterparts from the Full release without asking whether it's OK to overwrite the old files.) Once the upgrade is installed, launch Home Planet as you did before. You will see new objects and images in the Object Catalogue, additional selections on the Display/Map Image menu item in the Map window and the Display/Star catalogue item in the Sky window.

Thanks to John Walker for this great program!