About the mathematical position of stars.

[Patrunjel]

Hi and thanks a lot for the answers on my last topic

The time spent on observations is quite low for me, because I live in an area with a lot of light pollution, and I don't have the required age (in my country) to drive to a nice place. But tomorrow morning will be the first day of observations for me.

Right now I'm trying to get on a piece of paper as many things I can see in that morning (it will be at 4am), but I'm a little stuck here...

I use Stellarium to help me plan and figure out what will be out there to see, but I have some problems locating what I will see.

First of all, I should mention that the round part of my compass is divided into 35 sections, so that's quite unusual (for me, at least).

And the actual problem is that I want to be a little more precise with the position of some celestial objects, just because I have a hunch I will lose my orientation and end up looking at some other stuff. But in stellarium there is no division of the circle that represents the cardinal points, I just have N,S,E,W. There is some information on the position of the object in the upper-left corner of the screen, but I don't really have a clue on how to interpret that information...

So, long sorry short, how can I be a little more precise with the position of celestial objects in Stellarium?

A little help on using my compass to help myself point to more precise points than N,S,E,W would be really helpful as well.

Any other information useful for this big moment for me would be very helpful as well

*I guess there is a lot of info on the subjects that interest me, and it would be a waste of your time to write it all down, so a useful keyword for google, or a link is all that I ask for . (And sorry for the long post )

[Paxo]

Stellarium should give you the alt/Az coordinates for stars/objects, you can use this with your compass to find objects.

This tells you how to do it: Positional Astronomy: <br>the alt-az system

Basically one number gives you the altitude of the star, given as an angle from the horizon ie 0 - 90 degrees, and the azimuth is the position on the object as a compass position i.e 0-359 degrees, from these two numbers you can find the object.

Steve