Worldwide Telescope by Microsoft is similar to Stellarium in that it is a virtual planetarium, however, it presents its stars as images from a variety of different image catalogues. This has the added bonus of seeing how objects will appear in reality (when using an optical catalogue) and in different frequency bands. Worldwide Telescope also has the ability to search for objects but in a more flexible manor with a variety of different catalogue numbers. A Simbad search can be performed from the program.
The telescope & CCD you are using can also be set so that a field of view box is present on screen. This was particularly useful for verifying that an image we took was indeed of the star we were looking for.
To set up the Meade LX200 and SBIG ST-7E in WWT:
- Open the 'View' tab by clicking on it.
- Check 'Field of View Indicator' under the 'Constellation Lines & Overlays' section.
- Click the 'Setup' button beside it.
- Select 'Meade Instruments' and 'LX200-ACF 10"' for the telescope manufacturer and model.
- Select 'Santa Barbara Instrument Group' and 'ST-7E' for the camera manufacturer and model.
- If you have set the CCD on the back of the telescope with the cables on the underside, then set the 'camera rotation' angle to 0.
A field of view box that correctly matches the Meade/SBIG arrangement should now be visible when you zoom in on the sky.
The observing location and observing time are also found on the view tab and are self explanatory. These need to be set up in order to obtain a representation of the sky from the observatory at a given time.
 |
| Figure 1: A typical view of the Worldwide Telescope user interface. The field of view indicator is the large white box and while the smaller white box indicates the tracking CCD on the ST-7E, which is not in use. |
