Astronomy/Star Gazing & SkyGlobe

[oracle]

Probably no one cares about it, but I enjoy looking up every night, and checking out the stars and planets. For anyone else who also find it interesting, or would like to know more, I've decided to make this thread... purely out of boredom.

Firstly, to know what you're looking at, there's a great program called SkyGlobe. With it, you specify your location, and it will show you a visual representation of what stars are in your sky atm, and what they are. More info on SkyGlobe at bottom of post.

For those who don't know, Mars is real close atm, and on August 27 will be the closest it's been in 60,000 years. Those of you in Australia, go outside tonight about 10:30 and look to the East. You can't miss the huge red dot in the sky, it's about as bright as Jupiter gets. Those in the US may need to wait a little later to see it... A little after midnight should get it high enough above the horizon to see.

Personally, the best time for stargazing (as far as I'm concerened) is the first few months in the year. Reletively early at night (9:30-10:30) you can see Jupiter, Saturn, Sirius, and Orion, all in one sky.

Also, it's also fun to be able to point out to people stars/planets/constellations in the sky. They'll ask "How do you know" and you can reply "Because I just do" or "Cuz I is leet" or whatever takes your fancy.

Edit: Fixed date for perihelic opposition

--

SkyGlobe 3.6

SkyGlobe show your local celestial hemisphere so you can see what stars, planets, and bodies are in your sky. It can also jump forward and wind back in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries, and mellenia; good for predicting when the sun will rise/set on a particular day, too. I have a copy of SkyGlobe sitting on my server so I can access it anywhere I go. If you want it, feel free to grab it.

SkyGlobe.zip (http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~joshua.y/files/skyglobe.zip)

It will load with my configuration file, ie. location set to Sydney, looking north, 40° above the horizen, with a magnitude (star brightness visability) of 3.6. This is because in Sydney, that's about all you can see due to air pollution and "atmospheric seeing" (the name given to haziness caused by ambient light, also known as light pollution.) I have also disabled the virtual Milky Way in my config as it doesn't at all look milky in Sydney.

To change you location and to make a new config file, hit "L", set location, and then press "0". You can make up to 10 configs (1-9) by pressing that number (press "3" to save a configuration, press "Shift+3" to load that config.) SkyGlobe always loads with config 0 at your current time. Other configs load with the time SkyGlobe was set to when you made the config file. If you wanna leave it running on the screen, press "r" to tell it to move in realtime.

Most options appear on the right hand menu, but some are hidden. Just muck around with Shift, Alt, or Ctrl with some of the options to see what you get (eg. F3 turns off the planets. Shift+F3 turns off planet names. Alt-F3 shows a top view of our solar system.

The rest is all pretty self-explanatory. I've been using this program for ages, (hence my right hand menu is turned off all together) so if you have a question, ask me and I might know it. Have fun.

Edit: Changed link target.

[beowulf437]

I have that prog and it is pretty good.

[oracle]

Yeh, it's probably the most popular star map program (probably due to the fact that it's free, easy to use, and would run on the almost any PC)

... but funnily enough, when I was typing this thread, for whatever reason, I thought to myself "beowulf probably has SkyGlobe" :D

Don't ask me why I thought this, but it was oddly funny to see your reply.

[beowulf437]

Thuvia and I go out star gazing when it is winter here. After the nights start getting below 0 c the sky gets crystal clear.

[oracle]

Well it had more to do with your location. I was trying to think of an American location of a ZGeeker to put into SkyGlobe to see how long after a star rises in Aus, will you see it there. You "Midwest US" was the first thing to come to mind.

I went 4 hours out of Sydney over the weeken (past Mudgee) and the sky was incredible. First time I actually saw the Milky Way as "milky."

On another note, I was gonna post the news about Mars being close as a news post, but was using this post as a guage to see how many people actually cared... Oh, well, I won't be posting an astromical news on ZGeek any time soon.

[Spingo]

I'm a bit of an astronomy freak myself. Enough that I should actually point out the Earth and Mars are in perihelic opposition on August 27, not August 21. :p And enough to have pointed out how visible Mars was in the IRC channel the other night.

I can also remember just over 2 years ago when not only was Mars and the Sun were last in opposition. On June 13 2001, from Sydney, you could clearly see Mars rise in the daylight sky at around 4 in the afternoon. It was a great sight to see.

Unfortunately, this time around, Mars will not be as apparent, but you might be able to make it out in the early evening AU time, or just after sunrise US time.

[oracle]

Your right about the 27th. I did double check it after I posted, but didn't have time to edit it.

Also, for those of you with telescopes (http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~joshua.y/smiley/wavey.gif) now is the time to be looking, as huge dust storms on Mars are predicted around the time of the perihelic opposition.

And yes, when I walked to the station this morning at 7:30, Mars was still visable, setting n the West.

[Pirate]

Check this shit out.

Source (http://www.astronomyonline.com.au/astronomy/mars.ehtml)

[oracle]

And another! This ones from Sky and Telescope (http://skyandtelescope.com/)... Another great site for info on astronomy.

http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~joshua.y/forumpic/mars.gif

[Mr Bigglesworth]

im also an astronomy buff.....however I specialise in much more powerful observation tools....and reading about it. ive still got my dream of being the first starship captain in space :)

seriously.

[oracle]

An Article about atmospheric seeing in the Herald

City lighting steals stars (http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,6783178%255E11869,00.html)
[David Craford] estimated that standing anywhere in outback Australia, 3000 stars were visible. That reduced to just 10 or 20 in Melbourne.Ripped off! Learn more at the International Dark-Sky Association (http://www.darksky.org)'s website.

[beowulf437]

City lighting is one of the reasons we have to wait till its below freezing around here for good star gazing. The humidity in the air reflects the lights for the city. Also during the winter the race tracks are closed and they are a big source of light polution.

[Asmodeus]

Yeah, around the end of august Im heading up to the vacation property to go chck the stars out.. its great. all farmland for miles, and no towns bigger than 3-600 for a about an 2 hours each way on an expressway.

punch in skyglobe for some place like chicago, IL or St Louis, MO in teh US and you'll get a decent idea of what the midwest will see and when.

[BSS]

That Skyglobe thing didn't work on my PC. There probably should be a disclaimer there saying that it's a DOS program. (Don't get me wrong. I love DOS. Just that some programs don't agree with Windows)

So after playing around with Skyglobe for a bit, under a VirtualPC running DOS, I've decided that I like Stellarium (http://stellarium.free.fr/) much better. Besides that it's prettier, it is also a bit friendlier to newbies.

While we are recommending programs :) ... I'm sure everyone knows this already, but just in case, you have to see Celestia (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/). In fact, even if you aren't into astronomy at all I would still suggest people check it out. It's just one of the coolest programs ever created. The attention to detail is something to behold as well. Watching the shadow of the moon pass over the Earth while simulating the last year's total eclipse was orgasmic.

[oracle]

Rightly so, but not everyone has a OpenGL card in their machine. My work machine has no 3D card, and my dad's old laptop that I took to the country with me also has no 3D card, which his why I use SkyGlobe.

I have Celestia already, but will check out Stellarium when I get home... It looks cool.

[oracle]

For some reason Stellarium will not run on my XP machine. The app launches, my resoluition changes, and I can see the task in the TaskBar... but nothing shows up. I don't suppose you have an idea why.

On the plus side, it works fine on my Mac. It's a nice looking app, but I'll continue to use Skyglobe for certain features, like checking what time the sun rises, plus it also gives me more control over what stars I see (compared the the Mac version of Stellarium, anyway.)

Edit: Also, I found SkyGlobe to be better suited to studying the effects of precession... One of the main reasons I got interested in astronomy.

Edit (Again): Ok, it seems that my vid card on the PC doesn't like full screen mode. Changed it to windowed mode, with my destop resolution and it works. Still... It doesn't remember your settings, and SkyGlobe still gives me more control over star and constellation names.