Seeking a Stellarium competitor / replacement

In My Humble Opinion
1

I needed a map or software to identify individual stars. Someone recommended Stellarium and I’ve been using it.

I specify a known star that’s near to one I need a name for.

It shows me a view zoomed way out with only the brighter stars showing (plus the one I specified, with an identifiying circle around it). There is no obvious magnifying glass tool, which is what I really want at that point. Instead there are a plethora of telescope-mimics that replace this entire view with how you’d see it if you had that particular telescope. It does not, however, seem to maintain the same directional orientation (and hence the sense of whether the star you’re looking for is to the left and slightly down or off in some other direction).

I’ve muddled through pretty decently anyhow but there’s one I’ve consumed a lot of time on and still haven’t been able to get Stellarium to identify it (i.e., haven’t been able to be sure that what I’m looking at in the zoomed-in telescope view is Star X as readily identified from a photograph, due to not being able to zoom in in gradual stages so I can see WTF I’m going).

Can anyone recommend me an alternative?

2

You zoom with your mouse.

3

Details? Click and it zooms in where I clicked? Click and drag to make a marquee and it zooms to the marquee? Right click? Scroll wheel?

ETA: I have an appropriately nearby star in the Stellarium window. Clicking ON it doesn’t do anything. Drawing a marquee doesn’t do anything. Clicking and dragging moves the stars around as if the earth were rotating.

4

In OS X, two-finger scroll (on my trackpad) zooms in/out to the center of the screen.
Just put the star you want in the center of the screen, and “scroll” to zoom.

5

I want the one with the red rectangle painted around it.

It can be found almost directly between eta orionis and pi-6 orionis, and between rho orionis and cursa

Or it could be found there if I could navigate Stellarium worth a damn. If it zooms for you, can you do me a favor and give me a name for this star?

6

I’ve never two-finger-scrolled in my life. I don’t know how.

7

What pointing device do you use?
On a Mouse, use the scroll wheel.

8

Mouse. Scroll wheel, huh? Lemme try that…

ETA: yeah that works :slight_smile:

HIP 24041

9

While I’m asking and making myself look ludicrously incompetent and all that… is there any way to disable the “feature” that makes Stellarium start off showing you the sky “now” (i.e., 3:40 PM, some grassland in need of more cows, no stars except the sun) and you have to hit the fast forward button about five times then guess when to stop it to get a night sky?

I always want to have it FIND a given stellar object. I never want it to show me the sky as it is NOW. God help me if I ever want to see the southern hemisphere sky in this bloody thing.

10

Here’s some discussion:
https://sourceforge.net/p/stellarium/discussion/278769/thread/700a8461/

11

I have SkySafari on my tablet and phone, which I’m pretty happy with. I would think that was HR1681, constellation Orion.

12

SkySafari = Not available for MacOS.

13

I was going to reccomend skye skeye? but it seems I’ve gone and switched to stellarium mobile for my iphone when I wasn’t looking.

However, I think the star you are looking for is maybe HD 33419? Not 100% behind this, but I think I got it right. I was able to zoom in on it until it showed a name/catalog designation.

14

The star is identified in Stellarium by multiple designations:

HIP 24041 (as I wrote)
SAO 131834
HD 33419 (as DorkVader wrote)
HR 1681 (as outlierrn wrote)

anyway, yeah, that’s the one.

Skye Skeye, like SkySafari, is not a MacOS application.

15

Yeah, HR 1681 is merely the 1st of 7 catalog numbers in my APP.

16

I seem to want something utterly different from Stellarium than what its designers think we all want.

Ideally I’d turn off the earth and the sun entirely. Now show me the stellar object I just searched for, dammit. Don’t show me that I can’t see it right now because the sun is up. Don’t show me that I can’t see it right now because the earth is in the way. Yeesh.

17

Couldn’t remember if it was skye or skeye. Yeah apple does seem to be kinda crappy that way. Not a lot of choice in the app store and what’s there is pretty much garbage mostly, even if it’s paid and not free.
However I don’t seem to have the troubles you have with Stellarium. When I looked up the star you wanted it was well below my horizon. No planet blocked it or sun or anything.

18

I think in my lifetime I’ve bought maybe three applications from the Apple app store. I’m much towards acquiring my software from independent developers. I mostly don’t care for Apple-branded software other than the OS (detest iTunes and iPhoto / Photos, don’t use their built-in calendar, don’t use iChat, etc).

The apps I do use tend to be superior to most of what I tend to find on Windows PCs. Admittedly I don’t have the depth of knowledge to select the best Windows apps.

Stellarium isn’t among the better ones.

19

I think this may be what you want …
Edit the config.ini file (this is in the start menu for my windows 10 machine)

Change the following in the landscape section (ie change these flags to false)

[landscape]
atmosphere_fade_duration               = 0.5
flag_atmosphere                        = false
flag_enable_illumination_layer         = false
flag_enable_labels                     = false
flag_fog                               = false
flag_landscape                         = false
20

Apparently, it should be in your user directory …

  • user directory This is the Library/Preferences/Stellarium/ (or ~/Library/Application Support/Stellarium on newest versions of Mac OS X) sub-directory of the users home directory.

(It should start up stellarium with no landscape or sky etc - like you’re floating
in space )