What next? Discipline: Education Now that you know how to find your way around the sky, you are ready to try to following activities: How to plan an observing session using Stellarium How to observe using the Real Time Control Interface (RTI) Any of the observing activities Tags: Stellarium
How to plan an observing session with Stellarium Downloading Stellarium Stellarium is a free, open source planetarium application which allows the night sky to be viewed from any location on Earth, on any date. The software can be downloaded from www.stellarium.org, together with installation instructions. When you open Stellarium, it adopts the date and time from your computer clock - the first screen looks similar to the image here.
Common Constellations Discipline: EducationA good way to learn more about the consellations is to use Google Sky for Google Earth, web-based Google Sky, or Stellarium, which are all free, to look at the constellations. You can turn on and off the constellations and zoom around the sky to find as many as you want.Tags: constellationsGoogle SkyStellarium
What are Constellations? Discipline: Education Away from city lights on a clear, moonless night, the naked eye can see 2000-3000 stars. As you look at the stars, your mind may group them into different shapes of patterns. People of nearly every culture throughout history have looked at the stars and given names to shapes they saw and invented stories to go with them. The pattern that the Greeks named Orion, the hunter, was seen by the ancient Chinese who called it a supreme warrior named Shen. The Chemehuevi Native Americans of the California desert saw the same group of stars as a line of three sure-footed mountain sheep. Tags: constellationsasterismGoogle SkyStellariumOrion
