Transcript

INSTRUCTOR:

As I hope you're realising, the Stellarium programme is an extremely powerful piece of software. It's essentially a planetarium in your computer. And I very much encourage you to explore the full functionality that it has. For now, we'll guide you through some of the basics of that functionality. We have a menu down at the bottom that will allow you to select which objects you actually see on the screen. So you can decide to have a starry field, or you can decide to have a starry field that is entirely labelled for you with the constellations marked out. And you can even show the constellation art, if you into the ancient Greek mythology, or indeed, mythology of any other culture.

But the most powerful aspect of Stellarium, when it comes to planning your observations, is your ability to wind forwards and backwards through time. You'll be able to have a look at when an object you're interested in is visible, when it's above the horizon, when it reaches its zenith-- which, of course, is the ideal moment to observe it. And you can very quickly and easily match what you have on your screen to the night sky above you, or of course, when you're planning your observations for Coast, to the night sky that Coast will be seeing. So make sure you set your location correctly within Stellarium.