Chart Navigation
Exploring the chart is fun and easy. You never know what
you’ll discover! The table below shows the basic gestures used
to navigate the chart and reveal more information about celestial objects.
Gesture |
Action |
Flick or drag |
Scroll the sky chart. |
Pinch open |
Magnify the sky chart to reveal fainter objects. |
Pinch close |
Zoom out to reveal more of the sky. |
Tap |
Show object’s name. |
Double tap |
Center and zoom the chart at this position. |
Tap and hold |
After about one second, a small pinkish cross
hair appears on screen, above your fingertip. (The
cross hair does not appear beneath your finger, by design. If
it did, you would not be able to see it!)
From here, as slide your finger across the screen, the name
of the object beneath the cross hair is labeled.
Figure 8: Tap and hold your finger on the screen
to identify objects by name.
When the cross hairs appear over an object, removing your finger
shows detailed information about this object.
Figure 9: Removing your finger from the screen
reveals detailed information about the object.
|
Swipe |
Delete items from a list. |
To specify a custom location (grandma’s house, for example), tap the
Where button followed by Select Location.
The Select Location map is interactive; scroll and zoom until
you find your observing location, then tap and hold until the familiar
pin appears. Next, enter the name of the location (“Grandma’s
house”, for example) and tap the blue arrow to save it.
Don’t forget to enter the site’s Time Zone for this location. The
time zone value is the number of hours from Greenwich Mean Time; positive
time zones are east, negative time zones are west. If you don’t
know the site’s time zone, search the web for the site’s name (or a nearby
landmark) and the words “time zone” to find it.
Tap the Done button when finished entering your location. Removing
a location is as simple as swiping the description, then pressing the
Delete button.