So the program is open, and I'm looking at a screen full of stars and who knows what else. It doesn't look like anything I recognize, and besides, it's bright daylight outside, but my screen is dark like it's midnight! How can I be sure I'm seeing the stars as they'll look from where I actually am?
The StarCalc program initially opens set to the hometown of the program's creator - Voronezh, Russia. Most of us don't live there.
Let's walk through setting
the program to display the sky from where most of us do live - State College,
PA. :-)
1: Click the Location button on the bottom toolbar.
You'll get a menu that looks like this:
2: Click on "List of Cities". You'll be presented with a list of pre-programmed cities throughout the world. Scanning the list shows that "United States: State College" is NOT listed. We need to add it.3: Click Add in the City List dialogue box.
4: Type the following information into the boxes (for a city other than State College, substitute the latitude, longitude, and time data for that city):
You can enter the coordinates for latitude and longitude either directly as decimals, as I have shown above, or in Degrees, Minutes, Seconds form, by clicking on the button, then filling in the information as shown below.
5: Click Ok to get out of that dialog box6: Make sure "United States: State College" is highlighted in the List of Cities dialog box, then click Ok in this box as well.
7: You may check "Take from Windows" in the Set Location box - this is fine as long as the location you wish to observe from is exactly the same as what is noted in the Windows location file (this is part of the initial setup procedure for your computer). In general, it is easier to simply input the information by hand.
8: Click Ok to set the location and return to viewing the sky.
Setting the time is even
easier than setting the location. In most cases, the program will automatically
read the local time (including the date and year) from your computer settings.
If you want to know what the sky will look like at some other date or time
(for instance, Saturday night when you'll actually be able to see something,
as opposed to Saturday afternoon!), you will need to change it.
1: Click the Time button on the bottom menu bar (this actual takes you into the same set of menus as the Location button, but to a different page).
2: You can change the time to whenever you wish simply by clicking the up or down arrows on either side of each number. The program can display a number of years into both the future and the past with no problem.
See if you can change your time display to match mine.
3. The "Rotation Time Step" is used in another set of features which move the display time forward or backwards by the amount of time you have specified. To demonstrate:
A. Change the time step to 1 hour.B. Click OkC. Press the Time Forward button on the sidebar.
D. Did you see the sky view change? If you're not sure, press the Time Back button (located underneath Time Forward), then press Time Forward again. The stars should move back and forth across the sky.E. The third button, Time Now, always returns the screen to the current time as determined by your computer. Press Time Now now.
