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chView help, plz

captcalhoun

Admiral
Admiral
i've got the chView star-map prog and a 50LY map.

but, i can't find all the stars on it i want. can someone give me an idiot's guide to how to add them, inc. where i get the info from to add them, please?

or at least point me at where to find said info.
 
In the Edit menu, there is an "Add Star" option that lets you add a new star (real or fictitious) by choosing its name, spectral type, mass, and position, which can be entered in either RA/Dec/distance or XYZ format. To get position and other information on real stars, there are several options:

The Internet Stellar Database lists most significant stars within 75 light years, except for a lot of the tiny red dwarfs about which little is known.

The RECONS 100 Nearest Star Systems page lists all stars within about 20 ly, including many that hadn't been discovered yet at the time the ChView files were created. This doesn't give distances, only parallax in arcseconds; divide 3.26 by the parallax to get the distance in light years.

The Hipparcos Search Facility lets you search for any star in the Hipparcos or Tycho catalogs so long as you know its HIP, HD, or TYC number. In this catalog, the parallaxes are in milliarcseconds, so you have to do 3260/parallax to get the distance in ly.
 
SolStation? Not one of the sites I mentioned, but they do list the numbers. For example, in the Alpha Centauri page, in the first paragraph of the "System Summary" section, there's a set of numbers in parentheses after each star as well as the distance. For instance:
Proxima Centauri (or Alpha Centauri C) is only 4.22 light-years (ly) away (14:29:42.95-62:40:46.14, ICRS 2000.0) but is too dim to be seen with the naked eye.

That means right ascension 14 hours, 29 min, 42.95 sec; declination minus 62 degrees, 40 min, 46.14 sec. ICRS is the International Celestial Reference System and 2000.0 is the date of the measurement (since the stars move and these coordinates change very gradually over time).

The Internet Stellar Database renders it as: Right Ascension and Declination: 14h29m42.91s, -62°40'47.2" (epoch 2000.0). And the RECONS page lists it in columns 4 & 5 (RA & DEC) as 14 29 43.0 -62 40 46 H, with the "H" meaning that the measurement comes from the Hipparcos survey. But they all mean the same thing, hours-minutes-seconds and degrees-minutes-seconds. The numbers differ slightly since they're from different measurements and there's always some margin of error. Won't make any difference in ChView. (An hour of right ascension equals 15 degrees, since there are 24 of them in a circle, so the minutes and seconds in the RA measurement are 15 times bigger than the arcminutes and arcseconds in the declination measurement. In either case, they're 1/60 and 1/3600 of the main measurement.)
 
thanks for the help. i can't figure this out so, i'm just going to use the paper map i made and fudge things slightly. :rommie::bolian:;)
 
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