Salutations celestial sightseers! I''m David Fuller with Eyes on the Sky. Setting your location
in Stellarium is a really important aspect of using this program because you
want your view that you see in the software to match the view that you see
outside. So unless you live in Paris France which is the default location for
Stellarium when you first start, you want to change that location.
Well how do you do that? The first thing you can do as you can either move your cursor
over here to the left hand side you'll see this toolbar that will pop out when you click
on this compass-looking icon where it says "location window." Or, you can click on
F6 as it shows and that will bring up this particular box. You'll notice that
there's an arrow there that's pointing to Paris France. There's a number of
different ways you can change your location. For me I live near Chicago
Illinois so I can just click on the map and you can see how the background view
changed behind me rather significantly. That didn't actually put me in Chicago
Illinois but at least it got me close. But you can see a list of cities that
are there and I can scroll down and say "Oh! There is Chicago Illinois." See how the
stars moved a little bit based on where my location was? Then once you've
done that you can go ahead and just click on this box here. it says, "Use
current location as default." So, for most people that's pretty much all you need
to do your sky will match what you see when you go outside. Now,
not everyone has their city listed in Stellarium and I will get to how to do
that later on the video. Or, it may be harder to find your city, so I'm gonna
show you how to do that, say, if you live in a small country. One thing that you
can do as you can actually just do a search in this box here. So for example I
could type in Kankakee, Illinois which is very close to where I live. And you will
notice how the stars will change when I then click on Kankakee - watch this - they
moved ever so slightly - it's not that big a deal, it's close enough, whether i just
Chicago or Kankakee, and that's fine. Once I've done that again I want to use current
location as default. Now anytime i look at it from somewhere else in the world
safe I wanna look and see what a solar eclipse looks like from
you know a desert in Africa, I can see how the view would look like in
Stellarium, from there. But then when I'm done doing that I can return to my
default location and go right back and then Stellarium will work as I need it to
for that. Another way that you can do this is let's say can't get in really close to your
country because you live in a small country, let's say the Netherlands. So I
click close to there but I get a number of different cities in different
countries nearby. So I get Germany and Belgium and France and all these other ones.
Well instead of doing a click around and hope I get close, what you can do is
actually choose the country that you want to choose from. So I would scroll
down in here to find Netherlands. I would click on that and now it brings up all the
cities that are in the Netherlands. There's a pretty good list of them.
There's a lot there. I can then choose my exact location in the Netherlands - let's say it is
Amsterdam. And now my view in Stellarium will match what it's like outside when I
go ahead and use the program to try to see what also I would be able to see outside.
There's one other way to be able to do this it's really helpful and that is to
enter your exact location using latitude and longitude. So for example if - let's
say you wanted to add something like, say - Breckenridge Colorado. And if I know what
the latitude and longitude are as well as the altitude I can then enter that
manually so that would be 39 degrees latitude. It would be 28
minutes. And it would also add 53.76 seconds, for that. Now I am west longitude - east of the
Prime Meridian. You would want to make sure that you adjust for that. If you are
south of the Equator you would want to make sure that you also adjusted the
north in latitude for that. So even by clicking on that, you are at least going to get
close and also remember to adjust your country for this as well.
Now breckenridge is 106 West
2 minutes
of longitude and 17.88 seconds. Now the last thing I need to so is I need to change my altitude.
Breckenridge is actually nine thousand feet above sea level or so. That's
certainly a lot more than 13 metres! But Stellariuim only gives you the option to input that
in metres, so you need to convert that to meters which would be 2965 meters above sea
level.
I can then at that location into Stellarium by typing the actual city in
there, and then I can add that to the list by clicking on this button and then
use it as my default location. And now I have Breckenridge Colorado added into my
list of cities. I can then scroll to that - I actually would want to type that in here - click
that - and now that goes there. I should do that as my current location. So make sure
you actually click on that. I know one of the things that's fun about Stellarium
is you don't have to look at the solar system from Earth. You can actually
choose a number of different locations either from moons or comets or other
planets that are in the solar system. That's a really fun way to see how things would
look and even look at earth and where it is in the sky from another planet in the
solar system. And then of course when you're ready to return back home you
just hait your return to default location, you come back home, and you can
look at the night sky as you would outside your door. Check out my other
videos on how to use this particular free and powerful program on my Eyes on
the Sky channel on YouTube, or at eyesonthesky.com. Thanks for watching,
keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed down, so we can all
see what's up! I'm David Fuller wishing you clear and dark skies.