STEPHEN E. HUTSON AWARD

The Stephen E. Hutson award was instituted to recognize outstanding effort in Macintosh Astronomy Programming. Stephen E. Hutson is responsible for the outstanding trio of programs: ScopeDriver, Dark Adapted X, and UTC Display. Steve, also, conducts a weekly radio show called "The Sky Tonight" which first aired in 1981. Steve was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in 2005 and is undergoing treatments to fight this disease. After a rough time, it now appears that the worst is behind Steve and he has made a remarkable recovery.

The first Stephen E. Hutson Award for Outstanding Macintosh Astronomy Programming was awarded to Steve Hutson for his fine work on the program ScopeDriver.

Stephen E. Hutson - ScopeDriver

ScopeDriver has become a popular planning, logging, and control interface for your astronomical telescope. The program is designed with elegant simplicity. It places modest demands on your system, runs quickly, and does not clutter your screen with unnecessary user interface “features.” It has been designed and refined by active, serious observers. It’s tempting to add feature after feature, especially because the “more is better” philosophy sometimes sells copies of software. But this “feature bloat” can complicate an interface, slow down a program, and lead to instability from program errors. We add features, too, but we also spend time refining our existing code to make it faster and easier to use. The result? ScopeDriver gets faster with age, and becomes more intuitive and streamlined in spite of its new capabilities.

Steve Hutson with his lovely wife Nancy and Stormy the dolphin.

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The address of this site is: http://mrmac.mr.aps.anl.gov/~macastroworkshop/sehaward.html