Stellarium 0.91 - Anyone use it?

hamster

Hey anyone using Stellarium? It's a bit like Starry night but it is based on an free open source model. I tried it out on ubuntu during the weekend and yup it's pretty good. I'm sure the windows version behaves identically.

Here is a scrshot:

quickbeam

Yeah, I love it. That and Celestia are my favourite programs. Big thumbs up from me.

hamster

quickbeam wrote: »

Yeah, I love it. That and Celestia are my favourite programs. Big thumbs up from me.

Yeah, I look Celestia too! I installed the Educational series to see how far it could be pushed to demonstrate the wonders of the universe - exciting stuff. I really got the feeling of 1AU (150m km) down to a knack - turn on the celestia space ship and head to the sun in 8 seconds - ouch! It was scary then when later on - the same speed would take 1000's of years to cross one of the nebula out there!

arcticwind

Hamster, you have Stellarium 0.9.1 ?

I can only find 0.9.0 and its a bit buggy. Can you point me to the latest download for 0.9.1 ?

thanks

hamster

arcticwind wrote: »

Hamster, you have Stellarium 0.9.1 ?

I can only find 0.9.0 and its a bit buggy. Can you point me to the latest download for 0.9.1 ?

thanks

I installed v.09.0 through the synaptic package manager or via the cmdline: apt-get install stellarium - latest prepared package is v0.90. But you can get v0.91 off source net. But you'll need to compile it manually. Or check the install instructions on the home website - they make it slightly easier. I went with version 0.90 so I could cleanly uninstall it afterwards.
One thing I would love in stellarium is sunrise/set times for the sun, stars and planets. Miss that from Starry Night. As well as the transit info. But it's a damn good program all the same.

jArgHA

I have used "Cartes du Ciel" and find it is also excellent. The software is also freely available and you can download star catalogues separately. With the Tycho-2 star catalogue, stars all the way down to magnitude 12 are available. Many other catalogues are available to be plugged in.

See: http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/index.html

As far as I know its only available for the Windows platform

hamster

Another one called XEphem 3.7.2 looks very nice and worth the hassle installing.

hamster

Yes, I was looking through Ubuntu Forums and it was mentioned that Sky Chart / Cartes du Ciel is indeed available for linux here at sourceforge.

To install - not bad:
downloaded the binary package (skychart_v3_beta010_linux386.tar.gz) from http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=64092

then I made a directory called skychart in my home directory. extracted the tarball in there (be careful, it doesn't have a top-level directory, it will make a mess unless you put it in a subdirectory)

it had a binary called 'skychart'. there were also 2 shared libraries in the directory. the runtime linker didn't see the shared libraries at first, so the binary wouldn't run. that was easy to fix though

hamster

Let me back up a bit... further looking into this reveals direct easy todo steps here.... simple (once you have Debian or Ubuntu).

Kevster

I use Stellarium too... ...I just loaded it up tonight and was amazed to see that Mars is visible in the sky! I went out the back to then check. It was one of the planets that I was yet to see with the naked eye. I think that's them all except Uranus and Neptune. They aren't visible with the naked eye ever, are they?

hamster

Kevster wrote: »

I use Stellarium too... ...I just loaded it up tonight and was amazed to see that Mars is visible in the sky! I went out the back to then check. It was one of the planets that I was yet to see with the naked eye. I think that's them all except Uranus and Neptune. They aren't visible with the naked eye ever, are they?

Uranus and Neptune are too faint to be seen - magnitude greater than 12-14... anything under magnitude 6 you should see - though with binos - you can up to 9. Stellarium gives the magnitude for each of the night objects. Now only if it includes rise/set and transit times as well.

Delganys Finest

wow that program's amazing:)
saw Mars the other night too,it was amazingly bright,at least I think it was mars.
Is there a way to set the perspective as if it was from (my) home as opposed to paris?

Delganys Finest

ah sorry yep found it nice one:D

hamster

Delganys Finest wrote: »

wow that program's amazing:)
saw Mars the other night too,it was amazingly bright,at least I think it was mars.
Is there a way to set the perspective as if it was from (my) home as opposed to paris?

Yup, sure go to the options and set it to your lat/long - or just take Dublin location.

Delganys Finest

Thanks Hamster

Fenster

I use it fairly frequently, in addition to Celestia.

jArgHA

hamster wrote: »

Uranus and Neptune are too faint to be seen - magnitude greater than 12-14... anything under magnitude 6 you should see - though with binos - you can up to 9. Stellarium gives the magnitude for each of the night objects. Now only if it includes rise/set and transit times as well.

you're mistaken!

Uranus and sometimes Neptune *can* be seen with the naked eye. Their magnitudes at the moment are 5.8 & 7.9 respectively. The average person with good eyesight can see objects brighter than roughly magnitude 6 (any value below that). Neptune does get brighter than it is now at times and those with hawkeyes can spot it at times also.

jAH

hamster

Sorry I was think about pluto. I always grouped Neptune and Uranus with it. 5.9-5.3 apparent magnitude for Uranus... that's impressive. Thanks for that! Next time I'm miles out of the big smoke's glare I'll check with my binos. My eyesight is pretty lcd-burned from work at this stage and I would be doing well at 5.0. It's sitting in Aquarius at the moment - on the 16th Dec the quarter moon will be just above it. Though it be glared out - at least it will point out the location.

hamster

Playing with Stellarium again today and I overlooked a neat feature - planet tracking! If you turn on the ecliptic (with 4 or ,). Press it twice - it looks like nothing has changed but the 2nd key press turns on planet tracking. Look for mars (ctrl+f), tap the = key to move it forward day by day. Cool. We can track it's progress towards the 23rd of Dec coming into the 24th early hours for a close one with the moon. Neat software!

hamster

Anyone come across any other neat features with this? Watching venus and mars with now these days. Constellation boundries are fun too - watching the moon hopping every 2 nights (on average) to a new constellation

* 07:44 venus at SE 17' and rising
12:00 Sun further left into Sagittarius
21:30 Moon entered Leo - heading towards Virgo (on 31st)
20:00 mars still in Gemini - crossing into Taurus on the 30th

Can't see many stars for real so Stellarium will fit the bills.

Plenty of stars in WoW of course.