Requirements    Quick Reference    Technical Background    YouTube Channel

The DOGULEAN Planetarium 3.4.3

"Dog-you-LEE-an"

What Does the Planetarium Do?

It lets you travel around the Solar System in space and time and see what happens there and then. For example:
A Jaunt Around the Solar System (Mouse, Touch)      Transits      Double Sunset on Mercury
Find more on the Dogulean Planetarium YouTube Playlist.

Learn to Use the Planetarium

Option 1: Videos

Start with The Elements.

Continue with The Basics and then Advanced.

Option 2: Just plunge in

  1. 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.
  2. Open Quick Reference in a new browser window or tab.
  3. Enter the Planetarium.
  4. Read the disclaimer.
  5. Check the "I have read and understood…" box.
  6. Press the "Continue to the Planetarium" button.
  7. Have at it.
  8. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. If reloading doesn't help, close the Planetarium tab.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. If you restart your browser and the Planetarium doesn't perform well, even with the Default Settings, don't use it any more.