Astronomical Widgets

Today I’m going to introduce you a freeware which can calculate astronomical events and data. You don’t have to wait for the news to be informed about an astronomical event anymore.

Screenshot of Aciqra

This software is named as Aciqra. By this freeware you only have to set your location and time. Just like Stellarium I have introduced you before, this software generates the sky of earth with constellations, planets, asteroids with grid and all that. A cool thing in it is that it shows the position of Earth’s shadow in the sky. Something really cool that we haven’t seen yet.

Earth's shadow as positioned by Aciqra

 Even though the sky generates is not very realistic this freeware provides widgets to calculate important astronomical events and data. Under the widgets menu you can see the following items.

1. Solar System

 

You can select any number of planets in the solar system and see their real positions relative to each other. Also you can animate them to see their motion in real orbits. That is something really cool. Isn’t it?

2. Conjunction engine

Here you should select two planets to have a conjunction with earth. When you run the simulation you can get the date of conjunction where the angular separation is under zero.

3. Solar events

This is the gadget that I found most interesting. You can get the information of all astronomical events by sun in a certain time period. You can calculate the date and time of solar eclipse, lunar eclipse, transit of Mercury and transit of Venus. Based on the location you have set you can see whether the event is visible in your location. You can even simulate it.

4. Ephimerides 

Here you can get graphs of elongation, angular diameter and Phase of every visible planet over the time. It really is a very informative object to study planets visibility.

So I’m sure you want to install it in your computer. The latest version didn’t have these widgets as I saw. I use Aciqra version 1.3.3.  Although this freeware get into trouble in closing it can be ignored due to the importance of this widgets.Get it from here. 

The latest version is not very interesting as I experienced. Go to the Aciqra website to know about the latest version from here.