Planisphere

Have you ever owned a planisphere? The real world version of the rotating "star wheel" have helped many of us identify and learn the constellations and name the brightest stars. This electronic version can do the same and in addition will displays the location of the Moon, Sun and planets from your location at any date and time. In addition it can help you understand many concepts relating to time, astronomy and the solar system, please check out the tutorials section to learn more.

When you open the planisphere it use the date last shown by the calendar. By dragging horizontally you can rotate the view and by dragging vertically you can look up or down. Zoom in and out with the slider at the top right, by using the mousewheel or by pinch-zooming on touch devices. By using the time controls at the top of the window you can step forwards and backwards in time.

The planisphere can display all 9110 stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalog. The number of star shown will vary with the Field Of View (FOV), zooming in will display fainter stars.

Hovering the mouse cursor over an object will bring up additional information. This includes Name, RA and DEC, AZ and ALT and magnitude information. This can be useful if you can't remember the symbols or to check the altitude of an object.

When zooming into the planishere start to display the names of bright stars, and the constellation names will become visible with a Field of View(FOV) smaller than 90 degrees.

By default the planisphere will use the same color codes as the main calendar display to indicate the Sun's altitude (daylight, twilight, night), you can turn off this function from the Settings page in which case the background will always be black.

The planets are represented by their symbols, for a legend of the symbols used see the: Events, colors and icons section.