Stellarium By: Stella

Hi all! This is Stella! I wanted to write about this cool new program that we downloaded onto our computer. It is free, and we have enjoyed every minute of it. A lady at the planetarium recommended it to us because it is what they use in their planetarium and in the shows. It is called Stellarium. I personally like the name-can you tell?!

Anyway we downloaded this program onto the computer. After we downloaded it onto the computer we fiddled around with it a little bit. It is really neat!

There is a button that you can press on it and you can set the time to the present time.

There are several buttons on it, and you can- (if you decide to download this) scroll over them, and they tell you what they do.

One group of buttons that I think is really neat, is there are a couple of buttons that say- Constellation Lines-Constellation Art-and Constellation Labels. They are really cool. If you click on the Constellation Lines, then it connects different groups of stars, and you can see the stick figures of the different constellations. Then there is a button which you can press and it says- Constellation Labels- and you can click that and it labels all of the constellations. Cool huh? The neatest one of all in that group though-at least I think so- is a button which says Constellation Art, and it makes all of the constellations pop up in really detailed pictures! We love looking at the different constellations, and seeing how many of them we know! (Sometimes the constellations take a minute to come up, so don't be worried if they don't pop up right away, or if all of them don't pop up at the same time.)

Another REALLY cool thing that this program does is it labels, sattelites and nebulas. Also, if you click on a star, it pops up in the top left corner of your computer with its name, light years away, etc.

There is one button that you can press and it looks like a circle. This zooms in on the planets, and they look cool, but there is a different way that gives much more detail, and it labels all of the planet's moons, etc. To do this, you simply scroll up on your mouse once you have clicked on the object. You can't zoom in the first way I mentioned, and then do this. You have to be looking at the sky without zooming in, and then click on the object that you want to see, and if then there is a play-pause button, and if you are having trouble viewing the planets and their moons, then you can just click the play-pause button. (You can also use these buttons and the fast-foward button to zoom ahead in time, or behind in time in the sky.)

One other thing that I really find handy is a search tool, where you can type in the name of whatever you want to see, and then you can click enter, and it will find it for you. Just a tip-if you try to enter Earth into the search guide, it won't help you. It'll just point your direction down to the ground.



This is just a little input on this program-but if you want to- Go and try it for yourself! If you want some more information on this, then just post a comment or e-mail us....

Thanks so much!





Stella giving info. about- STELLARIUM!