Celestia Forums

Hey

I am looking for software which will most easily allow me to check the path the sun and moon will take at any time in the future. I need to know this in order to be able to better plan a route or photo shooting trip. For example I check the geography of the Giza Necropolis pyramids in Google Earth, I check their coordinates and I check the coordinates of where I plan to stand while shooting, and now I want to find on what day the sun will be exactly between them. Or another example, there's a building I want to stand in and choose a time of year when the moon is directly overhead.

It would be ideal if I could see a map of wherever I want to be and two lines drawn on the map - one of the sun's path, and the other of the moon's. Then I could unpause the time, set it to days, and watch as the line moves on the map as the days go by, and choose the day when the path is best for my needs.

Can I do either of these two related things in Celestia? If so, how?

--- edit ---

Linux, Gentoo 64. I already have Stellarium. The ecliptic line shows the path of the sun, is there a way to see the moon's path? I have stellarium-0.10.2 installed, its marked as unstable on 64 bit architectures and righly so - it doesn't save my ground and atmosphere settings, and the ground display is borked.

Cartes du Ciel can also plot the paths of the Sun, Moon and planets (chosen independently). You set it up in the "Time simulation" setting, specifying the time step and number of step, labels and such.

Cartes v3 is in beta but I have been running it smoothly for years. Find it here. All OS's supported.

G