How to track the moon’s path or position across the sky in real time

Posted on September 15, 2007 at 7:25 pm

You might be wondering why I would write a post on how to track constellations, stars, the sun or the moon in the sky in real time from anywhere in the world? Well, actually it’s not something I was planning on writing, but it came up out of a certain necessity last night. In the Indian culture, there is one day every year where you must fast for the entire day until you can see the moon at night. So as you can imagine, after not eating anything for 20 something hours, you really want to find that moon fast!

After doing a little searching on the Internet and mostly finding useless stuff, I bumped across a site that mentioned a free open-source software application called Stellarium, which lets you view the sky in 3D from any point in the world in real time and totally live! And not only that, you can view the exact positions and drawings of all of the constellations, browse the catalog of over 600,000 stars, check out realistic images of the Milky Way, and even see the atmosphere! You can even search for objects in the sky by typing in their names, like planets, stars, nebulas, etc and the display will move to the correct location where that object is.

I thought this was a little too cool and I had to check it out. And even though I am not a huge space fan, I thought this software was just awesome and definitely worth writing about. The software can be a little tricky to use since it has so many features, but I’ll explain it here so you don’t have to spend an hour like I did playing around with it.

Once you have it installed and open the software, you’ll notice that most of the screen is a view of the current sky, like being at a planetarium. Across the bottom left are a few buttons where you can configure the options, such as your location, whether you want to see constellations or not, view the Equatorial grid, etc.

By default, the current location is set to Paris, France. Click on the icon that’s fourth from the far right, which has a wrench on it.

Click on the Location tab and simply click on the map for your current location. You’ll actually see the real-time display change depending on whether it’s night or day time in that area of the world. You can also enter the Longitude and Latitude values manually if you know them (You can always use Google Earth to find those coordinates precisely)

Click on the first two icons to the far left and you’ll get a cool display of all the constellations and their current positions in relation to your current location. If you don’t want to see the ground and instead see the entire solar system even below the horizon, click on the Ground icon to remove it from the map (the one with the tree on it).

If you want to find something quickly in the sky, click on the Search button with the magnifying glass on it. Type in, for example, “moon” and the display will move to it’s current position.

The interface is very fast and I was impressed by the fact that’s it real time and you can see exactly where everything is in the sky. Definitely a great piece of software for anyone who loves to explore space! Have fun!

Technorati Tags: track the moon, view constellations, space, real time world display

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One Response to “How to track the moon’s path or position across the sky in real time”

Stellarium « stop motion Says:

[...] until she has seen the moon. A quick Google search to find the trajectory of the moon led me to this blog entry, and eerily the author of this article had also found the software for the same [...]
October 31st, 2007 at 10:18 pm