User`s guide

146 Starry Night User’s Guide
What is a Starry Night File?
A Starry Night file allows you to recreate
all the conditions which you used in the
program to see a particular celestial event.
When you open a file again, it will restore
you to the same time, viewing location and
viewing direction as when you saved the
file. It will also restore the time mode you
were using when you saved the file. For
example, if you had time playing
continuously forward in discrete time
steps of one day when you saved the file,
time will again move forward one day at a
time when you reopen it. Finally, all of
your label, guide and sky settings will be
restored.
Note: Starry Night files are saved with the
file extension “.snf” at the end of their
name.
Some events for which you may wish to
make a Starry Night file include an
eclipse, a planetary alignment, or a
closeup of a galaxy or star cluster.
Pre-made files are also very useful for
teaching situations.See
“The Favourites Menu
” on page 147 to see
a sample of pre-made files.
What is a Starry Night file not? It is not a
pre-made animation sequence which
shows you blasting off from Earth, for
example. All a Starry Night file does is
establish the inital screen conditions -
from then on you have complete control
over how the screen view will evolve. If
you want to make replayable animation
sequences, read the section on
“Making Movies
” on page 151.
File Features
Most of the features
for working with
files are in the File
menu. These
features work
similarly to those
found in most file-
based applications.
Note: The File menu on the Macintosh
looks slightly different, as some of the
menu items are in the Starry Night menu.
New: This opens a new Starry Night
window with the default settings. The
original Starry Night window is not
closed, so this feature allows you to open
as many different windows as you want.
Open: This allows you to open a
previously saved Starry Night file. A
dialog box will open that prompts you to
select a file from your hard drive.
Close: This closes the window which is
currently active. On Windows computers,
this will also exit the application, if you
only have one Starry Night window open.
Save: Saves your current view as a Starry
Night file (“.snf”). A dialog box will open
that allows you to choose where on your
hard drive to save the file. Make sure you
save these files to a location that you will
easily remember.