Settings

All Starmap’s settings are described here. Touch the Settings icon in the main menu and select one of these sub-menus:

Navigation: grids, horizon, search behaviors, info, Telrad, path finder, compass and accelerometer, status bar, cardinal points, coordinates and field of view display.
Solar system: Meteors, zodial signs, comets and asteroids packages downloads.
Stars: Stars and constellation labels, double and variable stars, star colors, magnitude limit, Milky Way, constellation appearance, zodiacal signs.
Deep sky: galaxies, clusters and nebulae labels, filters and size display.
Colors: all map elements have a color selector. Return to default colors.
Wifi: connect Starmap to wifi services like telescope control.
Photos: load images from stamapShare.com, account settings, internet access rules.

Navigation settings

Azimuthal grid: displays altitude and azimuth lines.
Equatorial grid: displays right ascension and declination lines.
Show RaDec: displays equatorial coordinates of the screen center in the top left corner of the map.
Show AltAz: displays altitude and azimuth coordinates of the screen center in the top left corner of the map.
Show FOV: displays the diagonal field of view in the top left corner of the map.
Celestial equator: displays the celestial equator — the zero declination line — on the map as a dashed line.
Ecliptic: displays the ecliptic on the map as a dashed line.
Cardinal points: displays the cardinal points labels on the map (N, NE, E, SE , S, SW, W, NW)
Horizon: displays the horizon. When on, the navigation is limited to the observable half sphere. When off, the whole celestial sphere is accessible.
Finder start point: determines from where searches on the map should begin. Use one of the cardinal point as reference (good for beginners), the last view point, or directly go to the object. The last option will pop up a question panel with the other options each time you are searching for an object.
Compass: define here if the orientation of the device affects the map eye sight direction. Note that this option will not be displayed if your device has no compass. The accelerometer option will be displayed instead.
Accelerometer: define here if the tilt of the device affects the map eye sight direction. A vertical tilt will change the eye view altitude. Tilting the device right or left by 30° will change the azimuth. Important: without a compass Starmap has no way to determine the present azimuth. Beyond, a GPS cannot define the North.
Status bar: Displays the status bar of your device. Note that the status bar appearance cannot be modified programmatically, and that the bar will remain white in night vision mode. So turn it off if you want full night vision.
Show info: Enable or disable the interactivity of the map. By default, when touching a map element, a small info panel will appear. This switches this behavior off.
Target is Telrad: Replaces the green target around searched object with a 4° Telrad target image. Very handy for pointing to faint objects. In this case the Telrad will be attached to the searched object and not to the center of the screen, as with the main menu Telrad option.
Path finder: Activates the path finder mode. When searching for a faint object, Starmap will draw a line from the closest brightest star. Star hopping made easy.
Sleep mode: With this option you can disable the automatic sleep mode of your device while using Starmap. Beware, this can have some incidence on the battery lifetime. Manual sleep mode, pressing the top button of the device is always enabled.
Lanscape: This option prevents Starmap to switch the map to landscape mode.

Solar system settings

Meteors: displays the active shooting stars zones.
Meteors name: displays the active shooting stars zones labels.
Zodiacal signs: displays the zodiacal signs of Solar system bodies.
Comets: update the comets catalog of Starmap with the new comets and refined orbits. Note that reseting the defaults of Starmap will remove any update and use the original comets set.
Asteroids: update the asteroids catalog of Starmap with the new asteroids and refined orbits. Note that reseting the defaults of Starmap will remove any update and use the original asteroids set.

Stars settings

Star names: displays stars names.
Double stars: displays double stars symbols, with a circle surrounding the star.
Variable stars: displays variable stars symbols, with a cross symbol over the star.
Color saturation: adjusts the color of stars. The star colors on the map depend of their real spectrum data.
Limit magnitude: adjusts the maximum magnitude of displayed objects on the map. Beware, this also applies for deep sky objects, not only stars.
Milky way: displays the Milky way.
Constellations: Displays the constellation lines.
Constellations names: adjust how constellation names should be displayed, using local names, international names or abbreviations. From there, you can also switch the constellation names off.
Constellations selection: defines how constellations will look like once they are selected. The available options are name highlighting, lines highlighting, boundaries display and artwork display. Turning all these options off will prevent constellations from being selected on the map.
Zodiacal signs: displays the zodiacal sign of constellations when these exist.

Deep sky settings

Show names: displays deep sky objects names.
Galaxies: displays the galaxies.
Open clusters: displays the open clusters
Globular clusters: displays the globular clusters.
Nebula: displays the nebulae (not including planetary nebulae).
Planetary neb.: displays the planetary nebulae.
Other: displays all other deep sky objects, even those that are referred as non existent in the NGC/IC catalogs, that for completeness.
Show sizes: displays the apparent size of deep sky objects as ellipses, with the right orientation.

Colors settings

All map items colours can be modified, with the exception of stars and the horizon.

When an item kind is selected in the colour settings, Starmap shows the map and two colour bars. The right bar corresponds to the colour and the left bar corresponds to the intensity. Sliding your finger over the bar will change the items colours on the map immediately.

The map does not react to touches when colours are adjusted. A good practice is to place the item for which you want to change colour in the middle of the screen and then go to the colour settings.

Default colours can be restored by pressing the back arrow in the top menu bar.

Wifi

This menu lets you connect an external wifi service like telescope control. This service is still embryonic, meaning that only telescope control for osX computers is implemented today. This will be a future extension of Starmap. Please refer to the Telescope section of star-map.fr for a complete explanation on how telescope controls works in Starmap.

Photos

This menu gives access to the starmapShare.com settings. StarmapShare is a free astro imaging portal that will allow you to add your astro-images in the application, well aligned on the map, thanks to our automatic star patterns recognition system. Please refer to the StarmapShare section of this document for more insights on this free service.

The images can be retrieved from the web each time you press the camera icon in the main menu. The available images for the displayed sky section will appear in a small slider in the left bottom part of the map. When your device does not have a permanent access to the network, which is the case for iPod Touch owners, upload/select a large set of images in the application. Further network usage will no more be necessary.

Due to the generated network traffic and the large size of images, the image libraries can only be downloaded through wifi. The image sets can reach a size of a Gbytes. Starmap lets you choose which images you want to download, applying a magnitude limit or images for the North or South hemisphere. These images will not be synchronized with iTunes™, meaning the images will not be transmitted to your computer. The cached images can be removed/updated anytime from Starmap giving back the the memory to your device instantly.

A login to starmapShare is only needed when you want to share your own images. Set your account information and your images will be retrieved. Note that before being public, all images are reviewed by our team. This can last a week before other user see them in their map. However, you will immediately have access to your own images, public and non reviewed, whatever your have posted to StarmapShare.