Whether you are one of those who love to look at the night sky and the millions of stars twinkling in it, or you are someone who still haven’t thought about it, or haven’t seen the thousands of shimmering dots in the night, www.stellerium-web.org is a perfect website or getaway to observe such wonders of the vast sky above us.
We, living in urban areas, have little chance of observing the beauty of the night sky, but people living in the rural or open areas can see the breath-taking night sky beauty in all its forms.
Let’s take a peek inside the site and see what it has to offer the fans of astronomy.
Stellarium is an open-source software planetarium that generates an interactive display of the night sky.
Once opened, the amazing view of the sky will take away your attention instantly, but then you will notice the default location at the bottom of the page; this can be set to your location, date, and time. The proper stars, galaxies, planets, moons, etc. will then be displayed correctly for you.
You can check the menus and controls in Stellarium are in slide-out menus that appear when hovering the mouse pointer near the left-hand or bottom edge of the screen.
Hovering over menu options will reveal their names and shortcut keys. At the bottom, you will notice the small icons of constellation art, atmosphere, landscape, Azimuthal grid, equatorial grid, deep sky objects and night mode clicking them will work accordingly.
Looking around in the sky is accomplished by dragging the mouse, and the view can be zoomed in or out using the PgDn and PgUp keys or by scrolling right or left with the scroll wheel on the mouse.
The backslash [ key will always return to the default zoom level.
The search tool can be found in the centre or by pressing F3. Type an object name or just a letter, you will get suggestions of stars and objects, clicking them will open a brief info box about that star or the object. You can get the detailed information on using Stellarium in the Stellarium Tutorial.
So young astronomers, if you want to see which stars is where in our night sky, just visit www.stellerium-web.org
Published in Dawn, Young World, February 13th, 2021
