Salutations celestial sight-seers,
I'm David Fuller, with Eyes on the Sky. This is how to you move around in Stellarium
and Stellarium is a very powerful program that is free, that works on most any
operating system platform, and helps you be able to manipulate what you might see
in the night sky, so that you can then go find that outside using either binoculars
or telescope or even naked eye. But using Stellarium
does have a few tricks to it to be able to do it effectively. The very first
video was about how to set your location that's a very important so if you
haven't done that yet
go back and watch that video. Click on the annotation here, and make sure that
you say your location. Once you've done that you can then start moving around in
Stellarium. Now if you open up Stellarium during the day, you're going to see a
daytime view like you see on the screen here. So what you want to do then is go over -
move your -
cursor over to the side of your screen and you'll see the clock icon where it
says "Date Time Window" and just click on that and that's gonna open up this box which
allows you to adjust what date you have and also what the time is. Now this does
show it in 24 hour time so this is after one o'clock in the afternoon that I'm
doing this. So it's going to show 13 and then you can move forward by clicking the up arrow
or you can go backwards in time as well if you want to. You can even just manually enter what
time you want to if you wanna do 10:44
in the evening just put in that 22 there you can even change these. Now once
you've done that you may want to actually stop time so that view of the
stars doesn't keep spinning. You go down here to this lower toolbar and among these
buttons - see this "Play" arrow that's right here? Just click on that it becomes the
pause button and now everything's paused. Time doesn't move anymore you can see
right down here that 22:44:50 is just sitting there. If I click on that again
it'll keep going forward in time so we just wanna paused that. If we want our time
to stay at a given one or if we wanted to advance we can just go back in and
click that.
Now to move around the night sky there's a couple ways to do that. One, you
can just take your mouse and click on an area of the sky - so left click, and then
move the sky any direction you want to move up or down around. Another way to do
that if you don't have a mouse - for example if you are using a laptop - what you can
also do is use the arrow keys on your keyboard, and move things either one
direction back and forth or up and down so you can actually go all the way up
and over - to some degree. Actually you can go up towards the zenith, and then bring it back
down using your arrow keys. So that's one way to be able to move the screen to be
able to go and left-right and up-down directions. Now what if you want to zoom in
on something? Let's say you wanna zoom in on Cassiopeia more? Well the
first way you can do that is if you do have a mouse that has a control wheel
between the two buttons you just push that forward and that will zoom in what
you see. You can then left click again,
and hold it down to recenter what you're looking at, and zoom in some more. Another way that you can
zoom - again if you don't have that mouse available - is use the page up and page
down buttons on your keyboard. So page down will zoom out, page up will zoom in
and that allows you to start manipulating Stellarium in ways that you
can then look at a closer view of a given area of the sky. And this may be
beneficial particularly if you have a laptop at your telescope and you want to
see all these stars in a certain area and be able to find a certain object. You
can now see some of these dimmer stars, such as this 13.45 magnitude star, that is not far away
from Gamma Cassiopeiae. Now you notice that I clicked on those stars and you got information over
here in the upper left-hand portion of the screen. So a left-click
will select an object such as a star or a nebula or star cluster. The way to
then take that off as you hit your right click. And then that removes the
selection you've made for a given object. Now you can also bring up nebula and
star clusters and other types of objects in the night sky. So you can click on
this "Sky and Viewing Options" window. And in order to see where some of those deep
sky objects are - where it says DSO's here - you just click on that, and then we'll go ahead and get
this box out of the way - I'll do more in-depth of that in another video - but now you
can see that there's some of these nebulae in the area. If I zoom out, we
can see that there's NGC 381 over here. If I click on that it provides all this
information about what the object is, its magnitude, surface brightness... You can
click on the Sailboat Cluster here, NGC 225 that provides
information about it as well. And then we can look around the entire sky. Even if we zoom out, all of a
sudden we see there's lots of information. And as you zoom out you'll
notice that you lose some of the dimmer objects and some of the brighter ones
are those that will actually stay up. And the more zoom in, the more you get a
little bit deeper types of objects. And you can change that. If you go back in the
"Sky and Viewing Options" window this slider allows you to increase the number
of objects that you would be able to see. If we zoom out we all of a sudden have lots of
those. Or you can remove those by changing that slider the
other direction.
The other thing that you may want to do in addition to changing the date and
time manually here using the date and time
box, is you may also want to actually have time go faster and sometimes that's
beneficial to do. You can go down - again here take off the pause button - and then
just click this button. You'll notice how time is suddenly going faster.
Those seconds are are zipping by. You can keep clicking that and time will then
move faster again. Now we've got the minutes going by fairly quickly and you
can keep clicking that and time will move pretty dark quickly. You can actually
have time go ridiculously fast which is probably too much! So then we just want to
stop that, and then it goes back and just resets that. You can also go backwards in
time as well so you can look at how the sky would look going in reverse.
So that's an interesting way to be able to look at how the sky would change if you're going
the opposite direction of of what's normal time. We can then pause that. The other way
to do that exact same thing is you can use keys on your keyboard. So to go
forward in speed we can actually just click on the L button and that will
increase speed that way. The letter K
actually return speed to normal time. And then if we want to go in reverse we use J -
and all these buttons are right next to each other on your keyboard and that would move
time in reverse and again you keep hitting that and it'll change how fast
it goes. And we just hit K for our regular time, and we come back to our regular
speed. So that's how to get started with some of the very basic functions of
Stellarium. We can zoom all the way out and take a look at our sky - even the
entire night sky if we want to. That's an overview of how to get started with
Stellarium and getting used to its typical functions and its very basic
functions. There's a lot more videos on how to use this program and also how to
find things using Stellarium on my eyesonthesky.com page. So 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 a clear and dark skies