Celestia Forums

I am very new to this program so I hope I am not asking this in the wrong place.

Could the ability to view the sky from the users home location be added ?
After making a selection could the "RA" & "DEC" be displayed with the other details ?

What does one need to be able to edit the "stars.dat" & "starnames.dat" files ?

Alan

Could the ability to view the sky from the users home location be added ?

I am also a newbie to this forum. But I know the answer to this one, thanks to Frank Gregorio.

First find the Longitude and Latitude of your location. Here are a couple of sites where you can find this information.

http://www.calle.com/world/ (Excluding US locations)

http://www.arrl.org/locate/ (For US locations only)

1. Select Earth
2. Use GoTo menu to specify Long and Lat and GoTo that location.
3. Type y = Sync Orbit
4. Type Ctrl-G = GoTo Surface of Earth
5. Type Ctr-F = Change arrow keys to AltAzimuth mode.
6. Render: Show Constellations, Stars, Label Constellations
Type "period" to increase FUV, "comma" to decrease FUV, "]" to increase stars, "[" to decrease stars, ";" to toggle Celestial Grid

HTH ???

>I am also a newbie to this forum. But I know the answer to this one, >thanks to Frank Gregorio.

Thanks Dollard for the reply but I have sussed that method, & what a performance to go through !

Another thing I thought of after posting the request was a "View From a specified RA & DEC" option.

Alan

Alan,
I see your point now. It would be nice to see the routine I described incorporated into Celestia. Wishful thinking!

As for the Right Ascension and Declination option incorporated into Celestia, that also would be great. Astronomy is a completely new field to me. I am too old, and too lazy, to get up in the middle of the night to look through a telescope. Besides in the rain forest country where I reside the FOV is rather limited. I was hoping that Celestia would allow one to discover stars as is done with a telescope. I am rather disappointed with the GoTo feature as applied to stars; they all look the same. But I think searching for a star with given coordinates would be a challenge.
Dollard

Hi Dollard, like you I am too old (76) to be getting/staying up at night to look thro' a scope, although I have been thinking seriously about getting one, but again like you we don't get many clear nights over here in the UK.
A program you might like to try is "SKMAP", you can't go shooting off into space etc. but it is a good planetarium type of prog. I can't remember the URL but if you do a saearch in Google for SKYMAP you will find it easily.

The "GOTO" feature in Celestria I think goes much too close to the object, it would be better if it just swiveled to the object then left it to the user to close in on it as required.

Alan

Dollard Desmarais wrote:Alan,
I see your point now. It would be nice to see the routine I described incorporated into Celestia. Wishful thinking!

As for the Right Ascension and Declination option incorporated into Celestia, that also would be great. Astronomy is a completely new field to me. I am too old, and too lazy, to get up in the middle of the night to look through a telescope. Besides in the rain forest country where I reside the FOV is rather limited. I was hoping that Celestia would allow one to discover stars as is done with a telescope. I am rather disappointed with the GoTo feature as applied to stars; they all look the same. But I think searching for a star with given coordinates would be a challenge.
Dollard

The "GOTO" feature in Celestria I think goes much too close to the object, it would be better if it just swiveled to the object then left it to the user to close in on it as required.

Isn't that what the center command does? It's used by pressing c to center the view on the selected object.

Brendan

Alan wrote:The "GOTO" feature in Celestria I think goes much too close to the object, ...

This is a left-over from changing the version 1.3.0 Field Of View (FOV) default value from 45 to 25. Many of us hope it will be fixed in the "final" release version of 1.3.1, which should be available soon.

-Don G.