Slashdot Mirror

It was probably either:

* Celestia
* Stellarium

There is also this WebGL Stars demo back from 2012.

You can use Stellarium (http://www.stellarium.org/, or with the help of your package manager) to get a preview of tonight's sky at your terrestrial location (not accounting for cloud cover though). This includes a simulation of the actual eclipse.

Seconded. Stellarium is very good. My last purposeful use of it was to see the configuration of the sky on the winter solstice of 2012 (the one that got so much attention). It was 2010 or so at the time. Since then I've had fun just messing with it, having it fetch space telescope pictures for certain items, etc. It's gotten me more interested in astronomy.

You can use Stellarium (http://www.stellarium.org/, or with the help of your package manager) to get a preview of tonight's sky at your terrestrial location (not accounting for cloud cover though). This includes a simulation of the actual eclipse.

Let's assume you got a cheap telescope. What can you do to make it work better for you?

1. Get astronomy software. Someone else mentioned Stellarium; I guess that's the go-to PC software now. I don't know what's available for phones. But make sure it shows an object's altitude in degrees.
2. Get a red flashlight. I guess these days people use red LEDs; back when I was a kid the place to go was army surplus for those bent army flashlights with colored filters.
3. Get a protractor. It's cheap, it's plastic, it shows degrees, and it's probably on sale now for back-to-school.
4. Get a piece of thin string and a weight, such as a nut for a bolt.

Tie the piece of string through the center hole on the protractor, and tie the other end to the weight. Now tape the protractor to the body of the telescope, preferably along some piece that sticks out near the tripod so it's aligned properly. To get an object in the scope, find its current altitude on your astronomy software. Then tilt the scope so the string's position matches that altitude on the protractor, using the red flashlight to see the string and protractor. You might have to do some math to get the matching number on the protractor. (90-x degrees - see, kids, that's what math is good for!) Now you mostly have to pan the scope, which is usually easier than tilting.

One other idea that came to mind while writing this: Take the jack stand out of your car, tape it to one leg of the tripod, and you might be able to use that for fine tilt adjustments. I've never tried this idea, though.

I have had five scopes. My current primary scope is Celestron CGE 1100.

First, get a good set of binocs and a star atlas. I recommend either "Turn Right at Orion" and/or Sky & Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas. I have the Orion Mini-giants 9x63 and they are wonderful for astronomy. They are also light enough to be used without a tripod. It really helps to know the basic constellations when starting. Also get http://www.stellarium.org/

Craigslist has used scopes all the time. You could pick up a Celestron C5, C6, or C8 for a few hundred and prob. not lose too much on resale. Stay away from "department store" scopes!

Check out your local astronomy club. Our club has 20+ scope for loaning and at a star party you could check out a bunch of scope live.
Finally, the is a great resource: http://www.cloudynights.com/to...

Clear Skies!

I have a better question....why? Why would you go to this much trouble when you can use the free Stellarium and know where pretty much everything visible (and not visible unless you have a big ass telescope) and just call it a day? It can even control a telescope for you, just slap it on a netbook, wire it to the telescope and there ya go, easy peasy.

Aside from the fact that PyEphem is probably the most ridiculously thorough ephemeris calculator available, and is an optimal tool when you are pointing one piece of equipment at one single target?

I know, let's check with Stellarium's own documentation on the subject:

"As of the current version, this plug-in doesn't allow satellite tracking, and is not very suitable for Moon or planetary observations."

I noticed a distinct lack of both easy and peasy in that statement. Does that answer your question of "why?"

I have a better question....why? Why would you go to this much trouble when you can use the free Stellarium and know where pretty much everything visible (and not visible unless you have a big ass telescope) and just call it a day? It can even control a telescope for you, just slap it on a netbook, wire it to the telescope and there ya go, easy peasy.

Aside from the fact that PyEphem is probably the most ridiculously thorough ephemeris calculator available, and is an optimal tool when you are pointing one piece of equipment at one single target?

I know, let's check with Stellarium's own documentation on the subject:

"As of the current version, this plug-in doesn't allow satellite tracking, and is not very suitable for Moon or planetary observations."

I noticed a distinct lack of both easy and peasy in that statement. Does that answer your question of "why?"

I have a better question....why? Why would you go to this much trouble when you can use the free Stellarium and know where pretty much everything visible (and not visible unless you have a big ass telescope) and just call it a day? It can even control a telescope for you, just slap it on a netbook, wire it to the telescope and there ya go, easy peasy.

Who knows, maybe the guy didn't have anything better to do with his time but for everybody else you can do the same thing by just installing Stellarium and the extra chart packs. Hell if something you want to track isn't in any of their charts just tell 'em on the forums and i bet it'll be whipped off in no time at all, they just love adding more objects to the packs.

Don't forget these:

http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html - If you have smart 8th graders, they can do simulated astronomy and learn how we know some of the things we know

Stellarium and Skycharts (Cartes du Ceil) are among the best sky simulation and mapping software and well worth a look along with Stellarium. Or try Kstars on Linux
http://www.stellarium.org/
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download (newer more comprehensive
http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/oldversion/index.html - Version 2 (older, easier on the PC)

NASA World Wind
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/

Hubble for pretty pictures and the stories behind them
http://hubblesite.org/

If they don't mind math try a gravity simulator
http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/what.html

Various Roller Coaster Simulators

Rasmol Molecule simulator
http://rasmol.org/
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

Scorched Earth style artillery games may get their imagination fired (but be careful as political correctness may mean you're fired)

Much more. No time to post right now though.
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

http://www.stellarium.org/

Just run Stellarium and set the date 50K ahead and you will have your answers.

I volunteer at the local observatory and on open houses we will look at the moon, visible planets, Andromeda galaxy and different colored stars. These are things that can be seen in a small telescope.

Get outside and practice to make sure you can see these before taking a class.

Check for a local observatory and see about getting a tour. Ours will do tours to schools for a donation.

There is free astronomy software available on the net.
Stellarium - http://www.stellarium.org/

Get it for your students. They will enjoy it.

Download from http://www.stellarium.org/ ; all the software you need. Happy nights

In addition to a real telescope, programs like Celestia[1] and Stellarium[2] may be appropriate for classroom use. They are both available on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Stellarium can show you the sky as you'd see it with the naked eye, with a telescope, or up close (say to a planet). I remember thinking how interesting it was to use Celestia to fly a long ways away from the earth and see the constellations change and move kind of like Star Trek's Stellar Cartography. It's kind of fun to fly directly to the stars in Orion's belt and have everything move accurately. Really reinforced the idea the constellations only make sense from here on earth and that they are really stars in 3-D, which is easy to forget just gazing up at the sky. Fascinating stuff.

Maybe with a couple of LCD projectors you could build your own planetarium with Stellarium[3].

Beyond that, in future years, doing your own CCD photography may be beneficial for the kids you teach. People are taking pretty neat pictures with backyard reflectors, such as yours, and hacked web cams.

[1] http://www.shatters.net/celestia
[2] http://www.stellarium.org/
[3] http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Building_your_own_dome

In addition to a real telescope, programs like Celestia[1] and Stellarium[2] may be appropriate for classroom use. They are both available on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Stellarium can show you the sky as you'd see it with the naked eye, with a telescope, or up close (say to a planet). I remember thinking how interesting it was to use Celestia to fly a long ways away from the earth and see the constellations change and move kind of like Star Trek's Stellar Cartography. It's kind of fun to fly directly to the stars in Orion's belt and have everything move accurately. Really reinforced the idea the constellations only make sense from here on earth and that they are really stars in 3-D, which is easy to forget just gazing up at the sky. Fascinating stuff.

Maybe with a couple of LCD projectors you could build your own planetarium with Stellarium[3].

Beyond that, in future years, doing your own CCD photography may be beneficial for the kids you teach. People are taking pretty neat pictures with backyard reflectors, such as yours, and hacked web cams.

[1] http://www.shatters.net/celestia
[2] http://www.stellarium.org/
[3] http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Building_your_own_dome

Try http://www.stellarium.org/ - it's a virtual planetarium. After studies with software, even weaker telescopes are nice to work with, they'll confirm previous work and the whole (software + telescopes) will be more satisfying.

Why not let your students choose some/all of the targets, subject to final vetting (or pre-screening) by you? In this way they gain a feeling of ownership over the process and generally become more invested in the subject matter. You could even point them to Stellarium for free home planetarium software to plan their observations.

Whatever you decide to observe, your students will get more out of it if they are actively involved -- i.e., no passive observing. If you have several nights, you could look at Jupiter each night and have them sketch the arrangement of the moons (c.f. Galilei 1610). If you have a solar filter, you could do the same thing with sunspots (if any are visible). Venus, Mars, or Saturn's rings may be attractive targets, depending on what you want to do with the observations.

Finally, there are additional astronomy education resources at the Astronomy Education Review, a free online journal.

But will it have enough juice to run Stellarium? Because if it will I can see selling a bunch of these to the local astronomy club. These would be just the right size to mount on a little post near their telescopes. Does it not have USB? Because mounting a USB camera to the telescopes and offloading to this to check them out would be nice.

But even if these won't cut it for the astronomy club I can see selling these to the local college kids easy as long as it gets decent battery life. I'm sure I would be able to move a "browser in a box" that does light note taking in class and gets decent battery life for say $150-$175, depending on how much I pay for them. Hell I wouldn't mind picking up one or two for myself, just for when I have to take the boys to their checkups just to give them something to do. I just hope these don't turn out to be vaporware like the last half a dozen times we have seen 'cheap ARM Netbooks' on /.

Actually I have a really great graphic artist down the hall (and a former NASA engineer, how cool is that?) that I hook up with the latest FOSS tools to check out and he personally loves playing with Inkscape. It won't take the place of his "must have" software (Macromedia Xres, what a PITA to keep running, but he knows it like the back of his hand) but he has shown me some really cool artwork he has cooked up in it and it looks like a really nice tool.

I'd have him show me how to do some tricks with it, but he is also into Astronomy (naturally) and helps the local rocketry and astronomy clubs at the college and after hooking him up with Stellarium I have a feeling I know where his free time for the next several months is gonna be spent. Just the other night I was out at 1AM with him and the local astronomy club checking out galaxies with his giant mobile telescope while the students used Stellarium on their netbooks, very cool, especially checking out Jupiter's moons with Jupiter looking as big as the moon to the naked eye on that big telescope.

Back on topic, I'm sure that some day SVG will be up to the task, but right now it just seems more like an experiment that a full fledged tool for the web. Lucky for use there is still PNG, which is FOSS, and maybe if we are lucky some brave soul will cook up hardware acceleration for Theora for the big three GPUs (otherwise I think with the rise of netbooks it is DOA) but it looks like with so many things on their plates, plus trying to keep up with Webkit, I'm betting it will be awhile before full SVG support makes it into FF. Maybe with 4.0?

I second that. Where I live there's so much light pollution that the Big Dipper and Orion are faint. The sky looks nearly empty of stars. It's almost shocking how many more stars I can see when far away from the big city.

As for the planisphere, I find Stellarium works fine for that.

Have you tried giving them Stellarium? If you want to get kids interested in the universe and the tracking of planets and stellar bodies Stellarium is free, works on Linux, Mac and Windows, and with the added star packs you can pretty much check out any object in the sky, and even roll time forward and back thousands of years. Really cool. If you want to give them extra credit you could come up with some questions that will require them to use the software, such as locations of a given star or constellation in a given year, or have them look up how the stars were on the day they were born and have them write about it.

If you shoot me an email to the above address I have a graphic artist buddy that designed a really nice CD/DVD cover for Stellarium which you could use. Just download the program and extra packs and burn it to a CD set or DVD and use the artwork to give them a nice case with it. That is what he did with the students at the local colleges Astronomy club that he has been helping out and according to him they are all using it and loving it. While of course this isn't the same as 11-18 with a little time and imagination you shouldn't have any trouble thinking of ways to engage them with the software. I have used it with a 1GHz Celeron so speed shouldn't be an issue either. Try it, I bet you'll like it.

How did Stellarium and/or Celestia *not* make this list!? If one's criteria is for "Cool" applications, these can't do anything but qualify.

Of course, there are several Free (capital F) equivalents. I'd rather use Cartes or KStars than Starry Night given the choice, even ignoring the whole free software aspect.

Cartes du Ciel
KStars
Stellarium

And lets be honest about this: this is a company who has contributed NOTHING to the author for his time or effort and then has the gall to not only complain about his output,but smear all those like him who are nice enough to offer their software to us in a manner that allows to customize it to our tastes,with that "perils of open source" crap. I repeat this is just like those greedy lazy companies that sponge off the GPL for the software for their products while having a fit that they should Deity forbid have to give back. The only reason I am not nastier in my disgust towards them is I had the good fortune to see the positive side of open source this very night.

A customer of mine for whom I have been doing a lot of work recently and have had the good fortune to strike up a friendship with is an amateur astronomer. He also does a little consulting work on the side with the local college and has struck up a friendship with the rocketry and astronomy clubs,who like to pick his brain since he is a retired NASA engineer(he used to help design the full scale mock ups and did a lot of TTL and CMOS work for them in Houston. It was way cool to hold some of the original plans for the shuttle in my hands.). As we all know college is expensive and since the astronomy club is considered a "hobbyist" club they don't get the really cheap software provided by the college. I try to keep an eye out for good free open source software I think my customers would like and recently came across Stellarium which compares in features to the over $500 software that the teacher that hosts the astronomy club uses. After David showed them the other day what Stellarium could do and told them that I would be out there with him tonight to check out his telescope....well it was kind of funny actually. I walk out there and there is a line of college kids with their laptops hoping I would give them "that really cool software that David uses". So under a starry sky we had a little Stellarium install fest with me setting up the machines(mostly Windows and one Mac and one EEE) while David set the positioning.

You see IMHO it is moments like THAT that make Free Open Source software great,not some company whining that the software they got for free doesn't do exactly what they want. I read TFA BTW. Did you notice what they did when they had a problem? Did they donate some money to the developers? Maybe paid them a little money in return for customizing the software to their needs? Nope they just bitched and whined and smeared all open source with their little FUD article. At least the college kids who I helped out are grateful and are talking about donating a little money or time or at the very least writing them an email to thank them for their wonderful gift.

But it never ceases to amaze me how these companies think because they get something for free they can act like it is shit. I repeat: fork it or use one of the myriad of other pieces of software out their that better suits your needs. But don't bother whining when you can't even send a couple of bucks to the developers to get it customized to your needs. They are NOT your free employees so don't expect them to jump through your hoops when you give absolutely nothing in return. And as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Celestia and Stellarium are very nice but pale in comparison to WWT. Just try them out side by side. Seriously, it's easy (yes, you have to have Windows...). Celstia is at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/download.html and Stellarium is at http://www.stellarium.org/. Neither offers to rich visualizations, amazing high resolution images, easy navigation, great "guided tours," community features, ability to easily create your own tours and many other things. You're talking apples and oranges. I have used Celestia and Stellarium before and they're cool but this is in a totally different league. I find it very hard to believe that you actually tried WWT. Did you?

Ummm.... I take it that you didn't bother to actually try out Worldwide Telecope. Because if you did, you wouldn't even begin to compare it to Stellarium. Stellarium is sort of neat but offers about 1/100000000th of what WWT has. It's not even fair to compare them. But at least look at WWT before you post this kind of nonsense. Others, you can download Stellarium from here: http://www.stellarium.org/. It's kinda neat but...

What would it take to add ASCOM support to Stellarium? http://www.stellarium.org/

Stellarium for star charts and constellations. Windows, Mac, Linux versions. Highly recommended.

Stellarium can do that.

Then you could actually see that the bright object in the SE sky in the morning really is Venus, etc.

There's already plenty of software to do that: http://www.stellarium.org/

Try "Stellarium". (free software)
http://www.stellarium.org/

Set the appropriate time and location, and let it search for Perseus; the comet is in that general direction.

(Or were you joking about the fabulous star-gazing weather in the UK ? ;)

Or he can buy some cheap piece of junk mount and try to do astro-photography for ~ $1k and be very disappointed.

My biggest piece of advice to the newby: Green laser pointer, you can see the beam. Mount it to your telescope, I built a mount of wood (drilled 3 holes, glued on two rare-earth magnets from think-geek, it took 10 minutes) or you can buy a $100 setup, but any way you cut it the green laser pointer will help you locate things in scope much, much faster. You simply aim the "canon" by pointing the laser at the spot in the sky you want to see. Other accessories very useful for the newb: right-angle corrected finder, laser collimator (get the "deluxe" so you can align your primary with the barlowed-laser approach)

Get a barlow so you can use the barlowed laser approach to colimate your primary, it makes it dead-simple. The Barlow of course also can be used to double the "power" of all your eyepieces so you need less glass to get going (good glass is very expensive)

Pay the $12 so you can shop at Astromart, you can pick up most everything 30-50% off there.

You already joined your astronomy club, this is good, Cloudy Nights is a great resource too, the people in the beginners forum are extremely friendly and helpful. The one CloudyNights star party I went to (Buck-Eye-On-The-Sky) this summer was a great place to learn from the masters and it was a lot of fun too.

Stelarrium rocks, there are a lot of other programs that work too, but Stellarium is dead-simple to use, perfect for the beginner, OSS, free, and it runs on anything with any 3d card.

Most importantly, Have fun! Seriously though download Stellarium onto your laptop. Take it and any pair of binoculars you can find and go out tonight about an hour after dark. Look to the south for the "teapot" that is Sagittarius, the center of our galaxy. It is just exploding with star-clusters and is a delight through binoculars, and Stellarium will guide you through what there is to see in it. If that doesn't do it for you, then a telescope isn't gonna help ;-)

The first thing I'd do would be to install Stellarium. That'd enable you to "tune in" on stars, even in cloudy weather.

I actually had a program like that about 10 years ago. Universe explorer? Something along those lines. Anyway, you could put in a date and look at the sky for whenever you wanted, you could find the next solar or lunar eclipse, etc. It was cool while I was hooked on astronomy.

And now there's Stellarium available for free to do this.

SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Servey) has been in World Wind over a year now. And Stellarium is still the best way to properly look at the sky from a computer. You have no true reference points in the GE Sky.. it is just a "pretty viewer".

...a bit like this? except for open source. hu. now, what should motivate me using the google-tool?

Check out Stellarium, a cross-platform OpenGL application that takes your coordinates and gives you a realistic 3D night sky, with optional star names, constellation names, constellations, and all kinds of other nifty features. It's perfect for a night of stargazing.

The "true peak time" isn't listed exactly on the articles because it is very difficult to predict exactly when you'll get a dramatic increase of meteors. I remember a couple of years ago when they predicted a Leonids meteor storm to occur near midnight of +8GMT, and it didn't happen; apparently the pile of space dirt got blown off course by the solar wind and the Leonids peak actually happened in the daytime where I lived.

For global viewers, just pick a time when the constellation Lyra is up in the sky, and for easiest viewing, when the moon hasn't risen. Try Stellarium http://www.stellarium.org/ to find your best time. If you are able to view it after midnight, all the better as that's when the most meteors will be directly slamming into the atmosphere overhead.

Here are a few other examples of free programs which I forgot to include. Like the others they are available in both Windows and Linux versions.

• GnuPG - The GNU Privacy Guard which can encrypt and sign you data and your communications
• DOSBox the Dos emulator for running many old DOS games and programs
• Firebird the relational database program
• PostgreSQL object-relational database management system
• Stellarium is a free open source planetarium

Don't be a software pirate, stay legal and properly licensed by using the various free open source GPL licensed programs instead that are also available in Windows versions. Many of the best free GPL licensed open source programs which have been developed for Linux users have also been released in Windows versions. Not everyone is ready yet to move from Windows to a free GPL licensed alternative such as Ubuntu Linux. For them, a first step to freedom would be to keep on using a properly licensed copy of Windows, but to start using the various free GPL licensed alternatives to their various favorite programs. Someday, if they decide to move to a totally free operating system such as Linux they will then be able to use the Linux versions of those same programs. There is now an amazingly large complete alternative free software ecosystem of free GPL licenced software legally available for free to everyone.

Here are just a few examples of free (mostly GPL licensed) programs which are also available in Windows versions:

• OpenOffice the free office suite
• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email program
• Clamwin free antivirus
• Gimp image mainpulation program for photo retouching and image composition
• ImageMagick software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images
• Inkscape open source scalable vector graphics editor
• PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client
• FTP client and server
• 7-Zip file archiver which can handle compression formats such as 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Scribus open source page layout application
• AbiWord the free word processing program
• Gnumeric the free spreadsheet program
• Stellarium free open source planetarium
• Celestia free space simulation and space exploration program

Although each day is fairly descriptive and tells you about a new object, it doesn't tell you where to find it. Here's what the book recommended:

www.astrosurf.com/astropc/cartes
www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky

The first one is a downloadable program, the second is web based. For the open source crowd i'd recommend Stellarium.

http://www.stellarium.org/

Celestia is also interesting in that it allows you to travel off the surface the earth. More akin to Starry Night pro. Not as useful to accompany the guide but fun to play around with. Also open source.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/download.html

Have Fun!

http://www.stellarium.org/ control orion scopes and is far better than the crap orion gives you for free.. took 30 seconds on google, but then your "dad" is probably too stupid to do that.

all of what you are are available on linux if you only exert a tiny bit of effort to find them.

Except the singer sewing machine crapola software. calling that stuff "mature" is a gigantic joke, but it does run fine under what lumpy said.... crossover office. too bad mom did not buy a decent sewing machine that used open formats instead of that locked down pattern crap that singer uses to keep you from making your own.

Mature windows apps are also a joke, most of them are broken or old VB apps written in the windows 95/98 days and do not behave right... most of the crap on the shelves at best buy in the software section is all really low grade junk that mom and dad or grandma get suckered into buying because the marketing BS that is flung at them.

BTW: how is steve in the next cube there at Microsoft? has he gotten over his cold yet?

• Summit of La Palma in the Canary Islands
• Summit of Mauna Kea on Big Island, Hawaii
• Eastern shore of Georgian Bay, Canada
• Plains of the Masai Mara, Kenya

While the higher you go the better the "seeing", it doesn't follow that the higher you go, the better the view, at least from a human perspective. I found that above 9,000ft, the lack of oxygen degrades my vision. Ergo, the view from the summit of La Palma was better than that from Mauna Kea, despite being almost 5,000ft lower.

And if you can't get out and find a really dark site, you can at least download Stellarium and play with that.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Well, it's a toy. A bunch of us at our school astronomy club had a ceiling projector for cloudy nights and also to see objects we could never see from my hometown. Of course, these days I'd just use Stellarium.

The article discusses NASA WorldWind but several interesting links are missing. Amongst them: Punt, a WW fork. Heck, you can also see Microsoft Virtual Earth data in NASA WorldWind itself. Even Mars 3D in WW. (I stop here, if this interests you, read slashgeo.org ;-))

I don't know if Stellarium counts as "software for space exploration", but it's worthed. Celestia too.

The Great Stellarium (open source):
http://www.stellarium.org/
Celestia (also free):
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
NASA's astronoly picture of the day:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/

Stellarium is really a must-download for anyone even slightly interested in astronomy. It's another open source software success.

There is always the moon from our overlords... but moon through NASA's WorldWind too.