Invisible Universe is as much about esthetics as about science. It offers poetry, both printed and spoken; music derived from radio waves from space by Dr. Terenzi; still images of stunning beauty with a wealth of supporting science. Some stills are supported by embedded movies as in Figure 1, where Dr. Terenzi points out a feature of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.
The information content of Invisible Universe complements conventional astronomy programs. Even the star maps, such as that of Figure 2, stress distant galaxies rather than the constellations on maps of the visible sky. Multiple "views" of celestial objects are provided in many cases, showing their appearance in different spectral bands and at different scales; unfortunately, they do not have common orientation so the viewer must examine the pictures carefully to correlate features. That is characteristic of the program and its meager documentation: information necessary to exploit the disc must be found by trial and error. While that sort of exploration may have been the publisher's intent, it makes the program hard to use fresh out of the box. Invisible Universe rewards that investigation, but a few more lines of text would help the PC user of this Mac-derived program.
Any color Mac and any MPC2-compliant PC will run the program, but fast video is essential if the sound and pictures are to play smoothly. Fortunately, the images are in 256 colors so even a modestly accelerated video card can give good results if color depth is reduced to that level. Even with fast video, greater color depth is a drawback; text is often difficult to read due to low color contrast, but that contrast is greater at 256 colors than at 16K or more.
Michael Richter is a freelance writer and an avid reader who lives in Los Angeles. He can be reached at mikrichter@interramp.com or at http://www.webcom.com/mrichter.
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