salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller from eyes on the sky this
particular video tutorial I'm gonna show how to set up the angular measuring tool
in stellarium because that's a really great way to be able to know how far two
objects are from each other which can be difficult to do if you don't have any
way to actually measure that of course you can use the azimuthal grid and zoom
in on things or you could use the equatorial grid and zoom on those things
but those very often don't line up exactly with the objects that you want
to look at so to do the angular measuring tool which you can actually
see the icon for it right here you do need to add that so what you're going to want
to do is go into the configuration window and over on this right-hand
plugins tab you're gonna go to the angle measure right here and as you can see
I've already got it loaded but you're gonna click on that "Load at Start Up" and
then you have to actually close Stellarium and then reopen it and then that
tool will show up now there's a configure button over here you can add a
couple other things if you want to display with a position angle for things
like measuring double stars and things like that or show horizontal coordinates
there's some other things I don't ever use any of those but you may want to
just know that those are options that are available so when you have that
particular angular measure tool there and available what you can do is you
just use your left-click on your mouse like this and you slide it
over to the object that you want to measure to and then it measures it and
you think well that's probably it right well there's actually some other cool
things about this that you can do for example that maybe where you want to
measure from from Vega to Deneb but what if you say well I want to know what
Vega is to Altair well you don't actually have to measure it again you can just
hover over Altair and then right click with your mouse and then it
automatically measures from there to wherever you want to go if you say oh I
want to measure over here now you can right click with your mouse button and
then to get rid of it you just left-click and then that gets rid of
everything now here's the important part to remember is that if you want to move
around now you're gonna wind up doing this and
you won't be able to actually move so you do need to turn it off
now I have this particular bar of icons all set up so it's locked in place
so you would have to go back over here and turn this off another way to do that
though is you can hit ctrl + a on your keyboard and then it goes away you can
also add it back in by hitting ctrl + a and do it that way so you don't actually
have to keep going back over and using your mouse to be able to do that now one
other thing that I want to show you because as you start to zoom in on
certain objects it's gonna get more difficult sometimes to use a measuring
tool just because of how the objects look so I'm gonna show you what you can
do to make it easier for you to measure certain objects so for example we can go
to the double double star Epsilon Lyrae up by Vega and one thing I would do is
you definitely want to Center this otherwise it's hard to zoom in so one
way you can Center is just hit your spacebar on your keyboard and then you
can zoom in and it'll stay centered like that and now you can say okay so we do a
ctrl + a we add our ability to do that now you can see how that makes it hard to
see so sometimes I'll go from the opposite direction I go alright well
that didn't work let's just go this way now I can see what my measuring is for
the difference on that so you're looking at 3 minutes and 26 seconds of angular
distance but this is the double-double right so if we take this off and we zoom
in more well I can't really see those 2 stars very well I mean look at how
blobby those are - that's as far as I can zoom and we can't see really where the center
is so watch what we can do to make this simpler if you go over here to the sky
and viewing options window you see how there's an absolute scale and a relative
scale you take relative scale and just bring that way down like that now you
can actually see stars that are much easier to use size wise and now you can
measure that and see again I'm right on top of my words there so I can actually
go from this direction and measure that at like about 1.7 seconds of Arc
in angular distance and then that's how we can measure that do remember though
that when you back out so we take off our measuring tool and zoom out like
this you can see how all the stars look really small so you may need to go back
in and bring your relative scale back up so that things kind of look a little bit
more normal but that's a minor consideration but something to keep in
mind when you're using the angular measuring tool in Stellarium and if you
like this video I hope you'll check out my other videos on how to find really
great deep sky objects and other things in the night sky I make regular videos
on my eyes on the sky channel right here on YouTube or you can go to eyes on the
sky.com thanks for watching