Stellarium V11 - Ocular plugin - anyone know how to switch eyepieces?

[matsey]

I've just found the ocular plugin in Stellarium and am trying to get it to work. Love Stellarium anyway, and the plugin looks really useful, I'm at least hoping that it'll give me a rough idea of what I can expect to see in my telescope... I think it'll really help me to be sure I'm looking at what I think I'm looking at !

So, I have set up my telescope and two of my eyepieces in the configuration window. Switching to ocular view appears to work just fine and shows what (I think!) I should be seeing with my first eyepiece. However, I can't work out how to switch to use my second eyepiece.

Does anyone know how? I found one forum thread that says ctrl+] should work, but it doesn't for me.

I'm on a windows vista laptop... has anyone else got this to work and know how to do this?

And if anyone is using it, what are your views on how accurate the view is?

Thanks

Matsey

[matsey]

Doh !!! Literally just found it !!! Been trying to work it out all afternoon, and the second I post for help, I accidentally work it out for myself

It's Alt+O to get the popup window, then you can select. But for some reason it doesn't work in full screen mode, which is what I'd been in until now.

So that's sorted. Would still appreciate views of anyone who uses the ocular plugin on how accurate they've found it compared to their own telescope views.

Thanks

[Ursa Major]

You could try downloading the previous stellarium which does use ctrl+[ to change oculars.

I just use the plug in to aid star hopping. If you put in your eyepiece details correctly it is very helpful.

I would say the views aren’t very realistic. The DSO's have photos with colour and the stars are different sizes showing how bright they are. This can get quite annoying when wanting to see double stars in it. The stars appear merged because they are so close whereas in real life they appear a lot further apart.

[Earl]

I cant get it to display my 450D on my 100mm correctly for framing purposes.

[Nova]

Im still using the version before 0.11.0 but the ocular view for me has been very helpful in terms of showing FOV for my EP's. As mentioned the colours shown on stellarium are not always what you will see and the rotation even when you have correctly flipped the ocular view image isnt always spot on. Think im gonna give V11 a go now and see how its shapes up. Just worth a mention that the help window (F1) will show you a list of all the keyboard controls available

[matsey]

Thanks all for your responses.

Well I got to try it out properly last night with my newly dark-adapted laptop screen (read: red acetate stuck over the top and brightness turned down... works a treat ), and have to say I found the plugin really useful.

You're right though, ctrl+[ no longer works in v11, even when not in fullscreen mode. Alt+O then using the mouse to select the eyepiece does work though (but only when not in fullscreen...nothing seems to get it to work in fullscreen mode in V11), so that's good enough for me.. I actually like v11 so will stick with this version.

DSOs... definitely can see that they're not so accurately displayed in the FOV.. though I already had a feeling that was the case looking at the whirlpool galaxy in all it's glory on my laptop... I somehow suspected I wasn't going to see Hubble-like image quality from my 6SE! That's a shame though and hopefully something they will improve, I think one of the issues us newbies have is not really knowing what to expect viewing DSOs, particularly in the smaller scopes, so having more accuracy there would really help.

Where it was massively helpful though was in general star field viewing, being able to match up what I was seeing through the scope with the view in Stellarium, particularly compared to using a Star Atlas... having the ocular view show the reversed image as well meant I didn't have to do an extra "translation" in my head to flip the image on the atlas.

And it was incredibly helpful when I finally got my first view of Jupiter at 2.30am this morning... being able to confirm that the three objects running in parallel to Jupiter were indeed three of it's moons and not three random stars that just happened to be vaguely aligned close by was really satisfying.

And switching the eyepieces as well did seem to give a pretty accurate indication of the different FOVs, which again was really useful, and I think will certainly help in the planning stages as well prior to an evening's (um, whole night's ) viewing.

So yes, in summary, I found it a really useful tool, just have to bear in mind that the DSOs aren't quite accurate, but definitely a tool I'll be using a lot in future.

[Nova]

i got to have a play with v11 earlier too. its a shame about the changes to the ocular view menu. i liked being able to change ep just using the keyboard but it did seem a lot smoother. another thing i noticed is the selected object info that appears in the top left when you click on something, it quiet often used to be unreadable and you had to reboot the program to clear the bug but this thankfully seems to be sorted. totally agree about the deep sky object images in stellarium. would be great if they showed a more realistic visual image one that we could actually expect to see. guess it wouldnt be as good though just having smudges