The Planetarium's purpose is to help you
travel around the Solar System, in your mind.
The name is pronounced
dog-you-LEE-an.
"Dogulean" means "having to do with
Doguleez" (
DOG-you-leez), its author.
Getting Started
- Close any browser pages or applications that do heavy-duty
graphics. Do this the first few times you use the
Planetarium, until you feel confident that your system doesn't
have a problem running the Planetarium.
- Open Quick Reference in a
new browser window or tab.
- Enter the Planetarium.
- Read the disclaimer.
- Check the "I have read and understood…" box.
- Press the "Continue to the Planetarium" button.
- Have at it.
- Refer to the Quick Reference to
find how to do what you want to do.
If Your System Has Problems
If the Planetarium just doesn't work, see
the
Requirements page to find out if
your system is supported.
The Planetarium does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of 3-D
graphics – over 5,000 stars, 9 planets (counting the Sun),
30 moons, 6 sets of rings.
I haven't had problems for quite a while (browsers cleaned up
their OpenGL implementations?) but the Planetarium could,
conceivably, overtax the graphics power and possibly the
computing power of your machine. This is more likely to happen
if you set the Planetarium's zoom or time rate settings high or
if you run another application at the same time that heavily
uses 3-D graphics.
You should also be wary of web pages in other tabs that have a
lot of advertisement activity. I find those can slow down my
machine a lot, far more than the Planetarium can.
A problem does occur, here are some things you can do.
- Reload the Planetarium page. Click the "Reset to Default
Settings" at the bottom of the disclaimer dialog. If the Zoom
or Time Rate was the problem, that should fix it.
- If reloading doesn't help, close the Planetarium tab.
- If that doesn't help (because your browser or the underlying
graphics system doesn't release graphics resources properly?),
restart your browser. If the Planetarium window comes up,
just click either "Back" in the browser or on the Warning dialog.
- If even that doesn't work, probably because the browser does
not respond to an attempt to exit it, you have two choices:
Either go for a coffee and see if the situation resolves
itself (because it was caused by thrashing — your system
does not have enough memory for everything you were trying to
do, so contents of memory were frequently being written to
disk and later read back in). Or you can restart your
computer.
- If you restart your browser and the Planetarium doesn't
perform well, even with the Default Settings, don't use it any
more.
Tutorial Videos
Introduction to the Dogulean Planetarium.
Demonstrates everything covered on the Basic level of the
Quick Reference.
Stargazing. Using the
Planetarium to find out what will be in the sky when —
that has been pushed into the background in this version of the
Planetarium, but you can still do it.
Adventure Videos
Adventure videos are meant to get you interested in using the
planetarium. But
please bear in mind that the point of the
Planetarium is to
DO, not to watch.
Videos that I think may be of more general interest
will also appear on the
Dogulean YouTube channel.
A Jaunt Around the Solar System.
The following are older videos made with a previous version
of the Planetarium. You can still do what these videos do.
The control panel just looks different in this version of the
Planetarium.
Watching a solar eclipse from the Earth
.
Watching a solar eclipse from the Moon
.
Perihelion and Sunset On Mercury
.
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