spacechart - display 3d star maps

spacechart

This manual page documents briefly the spacechart and This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page.

spacechart can be used to display maps of the stars in 3D and rotate them. It is capable of showing only a subset of the stars in a given data file, and only those within a given distance of the center of the display. Also, it shows lines between stars that are closer than a given distance.

Open a data file with the 'File/Open' menu item of the 'Open' toolbar menu. A map of the stars in the data file should appear in the main window. You can rotate it by moving the mouse across it with the right button pressed.

The 'View Radius' scrollbar allows you to select which is the maximum distance from the center star you want to see. The 'Zoom' scrollbar magnifies the center of the image.

The "User Coords" are the ecliptic latitude and longitude of the observer, and a "North" parameter that indicates which way of the screen is north. So, if the "north" field is 0, north is towards the top of the screen, and if it is 180, it's towards the bottom. If you change the user coordinates by hand, you will probably use only "round" values of "north".

If you click on a star a dialog will pop up showing the info about that star system. This dialog allows you to center the display on that star.

The 'Max Link Shown' field select the maximum size for which links between the stars will be shown. How these links are drawn can be selected in the 'Links' page of the settings.

The star selection dialog allows you to select a subset of the stars to be shown according to their luminosity, spectral class and multiplicity.

This program follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (`-').

This manual page was written by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pen~a <jfs@computer.org>, using the README files provided by the upstream author, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).