salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller from eyes on the sky in
this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to get a comet to show up in stellarium and
I'm talking about choosing a specific particularly a new comet that you might
have heard of on the news and you know what the designation is and you want to
import it into Stellarium and have it show up so you know where it will show
up in your sky at the right time for you so here's how to do that because this is
probably one of the most confusing things about Stellarium that's not
particularly easy to do so follow along carefully what we're gonna do is we're
gonna go over here and click on our configuration window and you can see how
there's a bunch of tabs across the top we're gonna go to the plugins and we're
gonna go all the way down to solar system editor okay so plugins over on
the Left scroll down Solar System editor and then click on configure now my load
at startup that has just always been on there you might need to check that and
if it says that and it's not checked check it close Stellarium go back and so
that it reloads so now that we're back into this we need we can see how there's
three tabs across the top there you're gonna click on the solar system tab now
notice there's a bunch of comets already in there but our comet is not
there because it's a new comet so it has to load that file so in order to do
that you have to click on import orbital elements well then you have to click on
a couple other things notice how this defaults to asteroids so
we actually want that to be comets because if you do asteroids and you try
to select from the bookmarks you're not gonna get the right information so you
have to click on comets and then click on that and I have always used the MPC's
list of observable comets that's always brought up any comet that I want to
see so I click on that one if it doesn't show what you need you may need to click
on another one but that's the one that's always worked for me
so we click on that now you have to actually import that particular list so
click on get orbital elements and then a list of comets shows up and you can see
there's Halley and Encke and a whole bunch of other ones well the one that we
probably want is likely way down a list because it's gonna be a relatively new
one you can see you go through a whole bunch of dates two thousand sixteen
seventeen eighteen nineteen and now we want to go up let's say for example
there I know there's a relatively new one out there at least as I'm making
this right now called comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE so let's click
on that one and we want to do add object so we wait for that to add the object
and once it's added it we can close everything we can close this we can
close this and now when we go into our solar system editor over here and do
this there's our comet we have to push up how faint a particular object is so it
may not show up right away but once you push that up
there's the comet and when we zoom in we can probably click somewhere in that
area and then that's going to show it's usually below and to the left of where
the words are that's where the comet is it's gonna give you an estimated
magnitude and you can then go forward and backward in time to see where that
comet would be and how high up it would be so you might be able to look at
that you know later at night so it might actually be look brighter for you or
something like that but that is how you can load a new comet into Stellarium so
that it will show for you from your specific location and where it will be
in the sky for you as well I hope that helps if you like this video please
share it or look check out my other videos I do regular tutorials on how to
find great things in the night sky as well as other stellarium tutorials and
how to use telescopes that's all for this video I hope it helped thanks for
watching