The DOGULEAN Planetarium 3.4.3

Quick Reference

Click the button above to toggle between "Basic" and "Advanced".

"Basic" describes only the items on the Control Panel that are visible by default. "Advanced" includes the items that appear when you click the "+" buttons beside the section headings on the Control Panel.

The instructions below assume that you have a standard 3-button mouse (two buttons and a mouse wheel) or a touch screen. If that is not what you have, there is a table of equivalents below, under Pointers.

Accessing the Control Panel

The things you are likely to do most can be controlled by clicking or dragging on the screen – for those you will not need to use the control panel..

Control Panel
Show	Double right mouse click or Long touch (1 sec.), not touching any planet or moon or Left mouse click or touch on "Control" tab at middle left or Press Esc key.
Hide	"Hide" button or Double right mouse click or Press Esc key.
Restore All Defaults	Reset all control settings to their original values, except for those under "Options".
Expand or shorten a section	Click on +/− button.
Scroll up or down	Left mouse or one-finger drag up or down on Control Panel.

Location

Location consists of:

A Home Planet.
Altitude (distance from Home Planet's surface), as a number of radii of the planet. (We count the surface as one radius from the center of the planet. If the planet is not perfectly round, this won't be the actual surface.)
The point on the planet below you, given by its longitude and latitude.

Location	Control Panel	Mouse or Touch	Keyboard	Comments
Home Planet or Moon	"Home" drop menu on control panel. Will contain all planets plus moons of current planet.			Sun will stay in the same position (on or off screen) and new Home Planet will be in same position (on or off screen) as the old Home Planet was.
Home Planet or Moon		Click or touch for 0.5 sec. on another planet or moon ("jaunting").		Jaunting will take you along the line to the planet/moon you click on, usually to a point the same distance above the surface of new planet as you now are above this surface of the old one. You will jaunt to the first planet or moon listed in the info bar, unless it is your home planet. By default, you will jaunting at a speed that depends on your planets or moons of origin and destination – so you can enjoy the trip without it taking too long. Under Options there is a setting that lets you control how fast you travel. A jaunt will be canceled if you change planets on the control panel, start a new jaunt by clicking on another destination planet, or if you reload the planetarium web page.
Longitude and latitude	Sliders and number boxes.	Left mouse or one-finger drag on planet. Set altitude ≥ 1.1 first, or not much will happen.		Longitude and latitude are those of point below you on your home planet. They are shown (Long. and Lat.) beside the Location heading.
Altitude	Slider or number box. The number box has up and down arrows when selected.	Turn mouse wheel when info bar listing home planet appears.	PageUp and PageDown keys.	Distance from Home Planet's center. Unit is Home Planet's radius.
Floating or fixed position	"Floating"/"Fixed" toggle button.			"Fixed" means you stay over the same point on the planet. "Floating" means that you don't go around with the planet as it turns. You still go with it as it orbits the Sun. When "floating", your longitude will change continuously as time changes.
Long., Lat.	Sliders and number boxes		More accurate for setting location on planet than dragging on the planet. Useful for stargazing if you want to view the sky from a specific place that is not where you are.
Location Decimals	Slider and number box.		Control the number of decimal places shown in the number boxes under Location.
Jaunt speed	Drop menu.		Average speed during a jaunt. Jaunt speed will be slower near beginning and end, when there may be more to see. "Normal" means: Jaunt speed is usually 0.1 c among moons of one mother planet (c = speed of light). We use a higher speed (up to 1.0 c) for moons that are distant from their mother planet. 100 c between inner planets. 1000 c going to or from Uranus or Neptune. Otherwise, 500 c going to or from Jupiter or Saturn. "Half", "Double", and "Triple" mean that multiple of normal speed. "Instant" means that jaunting is completed immediately, like ordinary planet change.
Set From GPS	Button (appears only when home planet is Earth)		Sets current longitude and latitude to that provided by the computer. User must grant permission for Planetarium to receive position information.

View

The View consists of:

The View Point (point at the center of the planetarium window), given by its Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (Dec. or just D.) – sky versions of longitude and latitude. (The RA and D of a point are relative to your Home Planet. See the Information section.)
Orientation (roll or bearing), an angle defining what direction is "up" on the Planetarium screen.
Zoom, the amount everything in the planetarium window is magnified. (The power of the telescope you are looking through.)
What, if anything you are Tracking. If you are tracking something, then as time goes by it stays at the same place on (or off) screen, with its north pole pointing in the same direction.

The trackball is the little grey ball at the upper left corner of the planetarium window.

The large blue dot shows the direction toward our home planet or moon, "down". The greyed out blue dot show the opposite direction, "up".
If you are close to the surface of your planet, turn the blue dot to the bottom of the trackball to find the horizon.
A black dot indicates the direction of the home planet's celestial north pole. A dark grey dot shows the direction of the celestial south pole. Confusing point: if you are looking down at the planet's north pole, then you are looking in the direction of the celestial south pole.
The small blue dots indicate the directions of our planet's moons, if it has any. If our home planet is the Sun, its "moons" are the planets that orbit it.
The large white dot indicates the direction of our home planet's parent planet. For planets other than the Sun, the parent is the Sun. The Sun has no parent. The light grey dot shows the direction away from the parent planet.
The small white dots show the directions of our parent planet's other moons, the siblings of our home planet.

View	Change on Control Panel	Change with Mouse or Touch	Change with Keyboard	Comments
View Point (Point at center of planetarium window)		Left mouse or one-finger drag anywhere off of home planet and trackball. Left drag on trackball will change it faster. While left dragging on the screen, a white cross will appear in the middle of it, in case you want to put something there.	Arrow keys	Equatorial coordinates of view point are shown on "View" line. RA = "Right Ascension" = sky version of longitude D = Dec = Declination = sky version of latitude
Orientation (Which way is up)		Left-drag the mouse along the very bottom of the Planetarium window.	R and T keys.
Zoom (Screen Magnification)	Zoom slider and number box	Turn mouse wheel with mouse anywhere off of home planet	Plus and minus keys.	Increasing zoom increases screen refresh rate up to a max of 10 per second. That causes the Planetarium to use more computational power.
Look At (a planet)	"Look At" drop menu.			Bring selected planet to center of Planetarium window, with its north pole pointing up. The planet you are looking at may be behind your home planet!
Track (the stars or a planet)	"Track" drop menu.			Tracking Stars keeps the same view point at the center of the screen as time passes. Tracking a moon or planet or Sun keeps that object at the same point on or off screen. If you change planets using the Planet drop menu on the Control Panel, the tracked planet, not the Sun, will stay in the same place on or off screen.
Track
RA, Dec Roll	Sliders and number boxes		RA (Right Ascension) and Dec, or just D, (Declination) are the equatorial coordinates of the point in the sky you are looking at. They are planet specific – the same point will have different coordinates on different planets. Bearing is the angle between "up" on the screen and north on your planet. It is a third way to control orientation. If you want to observe a particular star, say, a close double, and zoom way in on it, either track Stars or stop the clock, then set the equatorial coordinates you want.
View Decimals	Slider and number box		Control the number of decimal places shown in the number boxes under View.
Refresh Interval	Number box		Interval between screen refreshed, in milliseconds. This is a base value. Actual value is this value / (zoom * time rate).
Restore View Defaults	Button		Sets: Zoom = 1, Elevation = -89, Rotation = 0, Roll = 0, Tracking = None, View Decimals = 1, Can Roll = true. Equatorial coordinates will depend on your Home Planet and Location on that planet.
Can Roll/No Roll	Button		Appears only when you are on or near the surface of a planet. If you set No Roll, any movement will set Roll to 0, so that up onscreen will be up, the direction away from the center of your Home Planet. Useful for stargazing.

Date and Time

Date and Time always gives Earth dates and times.

Date and Time	Comments
Time settings	Planetarium Date and Time. It should be obvious how to set most of these. The up and down arrows to the right and left of the months select box will move forward or back through the months.
Use Real Time	Set planetarium date and time from computer's date and time. Does not change the timezone.
Toggle UTC	Switch between timezone as set on computer (local) and UTC/GMT.
Time Rate	Number of seconds of planetarium time that pass for each second of real time
UTC Offset (UTC +)	In case you weant a timezone other than UTC or Local. "Use Current Time" does not change this. If this value is non-zero, "Toggle UTC" will set UTC time.
Clock Running/Stopped	Stopping the clock is useful if you have some setup that needs at or near a particular time. "Use Current Time" will restart the clock.

Planet Max Magnification

This section mainly covers how much larger planets will appear than they should, in different situations.

There are two reasons why we need to magnify planets so we can see them well.

A planet on a computer screen is nowhere near as bright as a planet in the sky.
At zoom 1, we are cramming a very big piece of sky into the planetarium screen. Zoom 20 would give something more like real size, but then we would not see enough of the sky to make out the constellations.

By default, the magnification settings apply when a planet or moon is far away and there is no zoom. As we approach an object or zoom increases, its magnification is reduced until it reaches 1.0. That reduces the difference in size between nearby and distant objects. If you don't want that, there is a setting under Options that sets magnification to be exactly the value shown.

If you put the mouse on a planet or moon, the last item in the info bar, such as "(4.3x)", shows how much it is being magnified now, not counting zoom.

Planet Max Magnification	Comments
Planets	All planets but the Sun, Home Planet, and Home Planet's moons. Home Planet always looks as big as it should.
Local Moons	If Home Planet is a planet, "Local Moons" means its moons. If Home Planet is a moon, local moons are the other moons of its parent planet. Does not include Earth's moon. This control appears only when there are moons to which it applies.
Sun/Moon (and sometimes Earth)	This is the maximum magnification for Sun and Moon. Earth should be magnified this much when it is viewed from the Moon without any Zoom. From farther away, Earth magnification will increase to that for planets, if that is bigger.
Sun Bright(ness)	Affects how bright the planets look, not how bright the Sun looks.
Restore Planet Defaults	Set Planet Magnification to 40, Local Moons to 1, Sun/Moon (and Earth) magnification to 5, Sun Brightness to 3.

Stars

There are settings for star brightness and color intensity. You probably won't want to use them very often, so they are "advanced".

On the surface of the Earth, star colors should be as they appear from Earth. In space stars appear bluer. The Earth's atmosphere absorbs about half of their blue light.

Stars	Comment
Brightness	Increasing this value makes dim stars brighter and bright stars bigger.
Color Level	Intensity of star colors. Try turning it up to 10 to see. At Color Level 1, stars are all white.
Restore Star Defaults	Sets Brightness to 60 and Color Level to 5.

Star halo Determines how far from the edge of a star the sound of that star can be heard.
Expressed as a fraction of the radius of the planet.
Larger values produce choral effects when the pointer or center is in a group of stars. -->

Information

How to get information about what you are seeing.

Points above the planet's equator will have D > 0°. Its north pole will have D = 90°.
Lines of RA that cross the equator at the same points as its ecliptic have RA 0° and 180°.

Information	Control Panel	Mouse or Touch	Keyboard	Comments
Lines	Lines button			Planet's ecliptic (plane of its orbit around the Sun) is purple. Equator and lines of RAthrough the points where equator and ecliptic cross are gold. Other lines of Right Ascension (RA, "sky longitude") and Declination (D or Dec., "sky latitude") are grey Lines of D are spaced by 10°. Lines of RA are spaced by 15° (the angle that the Earth turns in one hour).
Star, Planet, and Constellation Labels	No Labels/All Labels/Planet Labels button.	Double-click cycles through label states.	Pressing L key cycles through label states.	Star labels are color-coded by constellation. More labels will appear with zoom. Planet labels are green. Moon labels are smaller and greenish. Planet and moon labels decrease in size with distance and increase in size with zoom, but less than the change in distance or zoom. Planet and moon labels are meant to appear when they are needed. Planet labels should appear when you are too far away to recognize the planet. Moon labels should disappear when the moon can no longer see the moon as separate from its planet.
Info Bar		Mouseover star, planet, or moon		Stars: name or number, constellation, brightness as magnitude – smaller is brighter; negative is possible. Planets: name, distance from viewer to planet's surface, in AU (Astronomical Units) or km, how much the planet is magnified (how much larger it appears than it should). 1 AU = average distance of Earth from Sun, about 150 million km or 93 million miles.
Annotations On/Off	Button		If annotations are ON, a message will appear at lower left whenever you do something with a mouse button or with touch. If you are making a video with the planetarium, that saves you from having to tell viewers about what you are doing that they can't see.

Options

Options are permanent configuration settings that are not reset by pressing the "All Defaults" button.

Options	Comment
Trackball On/Off	Toggles the Trackball at upper left of the planetarium window.
NESW On/Off	When you are on or near the surface of a planet, there can be markers for the 8 directions N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW. This button turns them on or off.
Onscreen Controls (Yes/No/Maybe)	"Yes" means the onscreen controls are always visible; "No", never visible; "Maybe" means that they are visible when the Control Panel is hidden.
Label Colors (Equi-spaced/Alternate)	Different color schemes for star and contellation labels. Use the one you prefer.
Jaunt alt. factor	Altitude will not change by more than this factor when you jaunt. That is so your new planet will not be inconveniently small, nor will you be so low that you have to back off a lot to get a good look at it. Jaunting is supposed to give a strong impression of the difference in size between your moon or planet of origin and your destination, so this number should be fairly large.
Mag Style	If the style is Gradual, planet magnification will be as described above under Planet Max Magnification, increasing to the designated value with distance from the relevant planet. If the style is Exact, each planet will always be magnified by the full Planet Max Magnification value that applies to it.

Onscreen Controls

When the control panel is closed, onscreen controls may appear at the upper right of the planetarium screen (depending on the Options setting for this). The onscreen controls show the current home planet, buttons for (Use) Real Time and for Fixed or Floating position mode, and date-time components with arrows to adjust those components. These controls work about the same as the equivalent ones on the Control Panel, except that home planet is not a drop menu, it is just the name of the current home planet.

The idea of the Offscreen Controls is that they should be just enough to support a beatific meditative state when you close the control panel and go jaunting around the Solar System. Let me know if they are not, and say what else you really need.

If you would rather offscreen controls appear always or never, there is a setting for that under Options.

Pointers

Summary of how to use other pointer devices to get the same results as with a three-button mouse.

Three-button mouse	Touch	Buttonless Mouse	Standard Touchpad	Result Produced
Press left button	One-finger touch	Touch left side of mouse	Press down with one finger	To left-drag, move mouse or finger while doing this. With a touchpad, you can press with one finger and drag with another.
Press right button	Long touch (1 sec.) not on a planet or moon	Touch right side of mouse	Press down with two fingers	Open or close Control Panel
Turn mouse wheel	Pinch or spread two fingers	Move a finger along middle of mouse	Glide two fingers toward you or away	Change Altitude or Zoom
Double click	Double touch	Double click	Double click	Cycle star and planet labels
Mouseover a star or planet	(Brief!) One-finger touch	Mouseover	Mouseover	Display info bar
Click on planet	One-finger touch	Click	Click	Jaunt

The Greek Alphabet

Learn! Astound your friends!

The brighter stars in a constellation have usually been given Greek letters.
The order of the letters will be roughly the order of their brightness.

Α α	Β β	Γ γ	Δ δ	Ε ε	Ζ ζ	Η η	Θ θ	Ι ι	Κ κ	Λ λ
alpha	beta	gamma	delta	epsilon	zeta	eta	theta	iota	kappa	lambda

Μ μ	Ν ν	Ξ ξ	Ο ο	Π π	Ρ ρ	Σ σ	Τ τ	Υ υ	Φ φ	Χ χ	Ψ ψ	Ω ω
mu	nu	xi	omicron	pi	rho	sigma	tau	upsilon	phi	chi	psi	omega

ΔΟΓΟΥΛΗΣ