Identifying stars

[Larry]

Hi. One thing I have always been confused about, is what the proper procedure is to identify a real world star using Space Engine. Since there is no indication of compass heading while you are landed on a planet (ex. Earth), I'm not sure how to line up the SE view with my real world view.

For example, over the last few weeks, there's been a bright star above me as I sit on my balcony at night, and I'm curious what it is (or if it's even Venus). Up to now, I've lined up my view by visually noting the geography (location of a Great Lake) on the map, to give me a rough direction bearing relative to my GPS location on Earth... plus (when it's visible) I also try and line up the moon to the real world one, to (theoretically) improve the accuracy a bit.

Still, that seems a clumsy way, and probably not very accurate... and it still leaves me with a lot of stars on the SE screen to choose as the one I'm seeing, even with the Mag scaled down to filter out the thousands of other ones.

Is there a better method of orienting the SE view to my real world view, and identifying real world stars/planets?

[Quarior]

You can hide procedural galaxies, stars, planets and objects. But maybe you need to disable some addons added custom catalogs.

[from2d]

This post (and thread) may be of help:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/314650/discussions/3/2646361029214380779/#c1747897731969612390

[Larry]

@Quarior: That's a good idea... It'll certainly reduce the amount of 'wrong choices' out there!

@from2D: Ha! That's my own thread!

[from2d]

Originally posted by Laer:

@from2D: Ha! That's my own thread!

Oh lol, stupid me.

P.S. Anyway, it may be of help to someone else.

[Larry]

Yup! (.... to it being of help to others,... not to you claiming you're stupid! )

I still wonder, though, what means there are to actually identify a real world star using SE... I mean, a white dot is a white dot, both in real life and SE. The best I could do is look for other stars, trying to find 'shapes' and then see if I could find a matching arrangement in SE... hardly accurate, and I'd imagine there's a smarter way to do it.

There's that grid type overlay in SE (...don't recall the proper name...). I'm sure the markings on that would aid in aligning SE to the real world stars I am viewing.

[nullwromalt]

Easiest will be to use a different application that shows you the night sky from your location. Stellarium is a pretty good desktop program for this purpose. There are a few mobile apps that does this as well, such as Sky Map for Android.

[Larry]

Hi, nullwromalt. Oddly enough, I was thinking the very same thing last night. While I was teaching myself the galaxy grid/globe system (via YouTube vids), I noticed that many of the people in the vids were using Stellarium, and that's also where I saw the thing I was looking for (grid system where the pole is directly above you). So, that actually was what I was going to do in my next session.

I'm still hoping SE adds their own in, as it gets kind of tricky knowning what angle you are looking up at when the horizon of the Earth (or whatever planet you are on) goes offscreen. It's hard to tell when you are looking straight up. Even a compass display (and a marker indicating the 'straight above you' pole would be helpful, although a proper 'cardinal + elevation' grid would be ideal.