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Chris Harvey

Chris Harvey

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Where is the moon right now?

A friend of mine was looking for the moon one night and it got me thinking about how I would find the moon. The obvious thing to do is look up at the sky. I think some people think that when the sun goes down the moon comes up but that’s not really how it works.

First off I thought there might be a fancy website where you can put in the time and your location and it shows you where it is in 3d or something like that but I couldn’t really find anything and some sites had a lot of scientific jargon that I didn’t really understand.

Many years ago when I worked in education I showed science teachers a program called Stellarium, I don’t think any of them got to use it in the classroom mostly due to the amount of bs you have to go through unless you have the right job title. Anyway Stellarium is a really nice polished tool for learning about astronomy.

From Stellarium article on Wikipedia:

Stellarium is a free software planetarium, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It uses OpenGL to render a realistic sky in real time. With Stellarium, it is possible to see what one cannot see with the naked eye, binoculars or a small telescope.

I made a screencast that you can watch below or watch Where is the Moon? Using Stellarium on youtube.

Download and start using Stellarium , its free and open source.

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