Celestia Forums

Hello, I just found Celestia the other day, and it appears to be a great application to use hand in hand with astronomy. The interface, however is less than intuitive, and the help files have not "helped" me to st up Celestia as I would like to use it.

I wonder if someone here can help me get it set up for my needs.

I wish to use Celestia to show the skies from my location, as I would see them standing in the field by my home, looking up at the heavens. Although I searched and dug and turned over just about every rock there is in the universe, I am at a loss for how to set this program up to view the sky as I choose.

So can someone here help a guy out?

Thanks for your help and advice!
Racer

Celestia is not really designed for what you're wanting to use it for. I would suggest Stellarium for that purpose.

That being said, you can pull it off in Celestia by going to Earth near where you physically are in reality, being sure to have the Synchronous Orbit feature on (the Y key). You can then simply "land" on Earth and then look around to see the sky.

It's less than ideal, but then again, it's not really what Celestia is designed for.

Hungry4info wrote:Celestia is not really designed for what you're wanting to use it for. I would suggest Stellarium for that purpose.

Yeah, I'm trying Stellarium too, with mixed results.

Hungry4info wrote:That being said, you can pull it off in Celestia by going to Earth near where you physically are in reality, being sure to have the Synchronous Orbit feature on (the Y key). You can then simply "land" on Earth and then look around to see the sky.

I got to the point where I was near my location, but couldn't figure out how to turn the perspective around so I can see the sky instead of the ground.

Hungry4info wrote:It's less than ideal, but then again, it's not really what Celestia is designed for.

Pity.

So besides Stellarium, what else is available to provide what I'm looking for? I would hope to avoid having to download, install and learn 2,453,986,546,864,876,982,345,254,153 different applications just to find the one that does what I need.

Any suggestions?

Racer X 69 wrote:I got to the point where I was near my location, but couldn't figure out how to turn the perspective around so I can see the sky instead of the ground.

Just left-click and drag to change the direction of view, or use the arrow keys.

When you are on the vertical of your home, do press [CTRL+g] to go on the ground.

This feature is described in one of the entries in the FAQ. The Celestia FAQ is a "sticky" near the top of the Help Forum.

See http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... 49#p118149
In entry #5 there it says

5. How can I make Celestia work like a planetarium?
I want to see how the sky should look from my backyard.
Answer:

• Select the body from which to observe; the Earth for example.
• Use the GoTo menu to specify your Longitude and Latitude and GoTo there (lat & long are entered in decimal format – there are websites that convert to/from degrees/minute/seconds format.)
• Type a [Y] = Sync Orbit (this locks you into position above the location you set)
• Under Windows, Linux-GTK and Linux-Gnome:
  
  • Type a [Ctrl+G] = GotoSurface
  • Type a [Ctrl+F] = change Arrow keys to AltAzimuth mode (This keeps the horizon level when panning left & right.)
  • Use the arrow keys to look toward the sky, you can adjust the field of view (FOV – how much sky you see at once) with the [,] & [.] keys.
• Under Linux-KDE3:
  
  • Type an [Alt+S] = GotoSurface
  • Type an [Alt+F] = change Arrow keys to AltAzimuth mode (This keeps the horizon level when panning left & right.)
  • Use the arrow keys to look toward the sky, you can adjust the field of view (FOV – how much sky you see at once) with the [,] & [.] keys.
• Activate the alt-azimuth coordinate display by selecting the "Horizontal grid" in the "View options" dialog.