Advanced Settings

These are normally hidden. To reveal them, click the "Advanced" icon.

• Chart Projection: Change the chart projection type. For more details, see the Chart Projections page.
• Double-click options: When you click once on a star or DSO, you get additional information about that object. Normally, clicking a second time dismisses the extra information display. This is the default behavior.
  
  If you want double-clicking to recenter the chart on the selected object, select "Recenter chart on selected object".
  
  If you want double-clicking to travel to the selected object, select "Go to selected object". Be aware that this option only works for stars with a known distance -- it is inactive for all deep-sky objects and for faint stars from Tycho-2 or UCAC-4.

  If one of these options is active, the corresponding icon ("target" for recentering, "rocket" for traveling to something) will not appear in the object's detailed information.

• Chart Size: Pick the chart's width in pixels. Its height will be set automatically based on the aspect ratio (also in the Advanced settings).
• Chart magnification: At a magnification of 1, the chart displays an area approximately 60° wide. Using a higher magnification gives you a smaller displayed area, in inverse proportion to the magnification. For example, a magnification of 6 gives you about a 10° field of view.
• Aspect ratio: Controls the ratio of chart width to chart height.
• Chart magnitude limits: These change the magnitude range for both stars and deep-sky objects. Larger values give more details (fainter objects), but also take longer to plot.
• Label stars closer than: Stars closer to the viewing point than this value will be labeled in orange text.
• Chart time (years before or after 2000): By default, the stars are shown as they appear at the beginning of the year 2000. Over time, the stars' natural motion significantly changes the appearance of the sky. The effect is negligible for all but the fastest-moving stars during a human lifetime, so as of the current date (early 21st century), for most views you can ignore this setting. To explore the appearance of the sky over hundreds or thousands of years, enter a non-zero number in this field. Enter a positive (for future) or negative (for past) number to examine the sky at a different time.

  Note for the technically-minded: This setting applies stellar proper motion and radial velocity calculations, but does not attempt to correct for precession -- especially since you can have a viewpoint far from Earth, making precession irrelevant. (For the really technically-minded, the epoch for Endeavour is whatever year you specify, but the equinox is always 2000.0.) If you turn on the constellation boundaries or coordinate lines (see "Chart Labels"), they will always be drawn in their positions for 2000.0. Endeavour also assumes the velocities of the stars are constant, moving in straight lines, so this setting will be very inaccurate after several hundred thousand years. Eventually, at very large times past or future, all the stars fly away, never to be seen again. Calculating stars' orbits around the galaxy is beyond the scope of this application.

• Stellar motion markers (years before or after chart time): Controls the length of the stellar motion markers. Each marker represents the amount and direction of motion of the star over the time frame, in years, specified for this setting. Negative numbers correspond to years before the chart time, and positive numbers to years after.

Main help page