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Stellarium Landscape for Walkway Over The Hudson

From this page you can download a custom landscape for the Walkway over the Hudson, in Poughkeepsie, New York, for the Stellarium planetarium software.
Stellarium is free planetarium software for your computer. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Stellarium shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is also used in real planetariums (including the one at SUNY New Paltz).

You can learn more about Stellarium, and download the software, from Stellarium.org

Getting Started with Stellarium
If you are new to Stellarium this handout (from an introductory course in Astronomy that I taught at Marist College) will help you quickly learn how to use the controls to configure Stellarium and to navigate the sky to view the objects that interest you.

Installing a Landscape
Detailed instructions for installing a landscape in Stellarium.

More Landscapes (from Stellarium.org)
The complete collection of user contributed landscapes for Stellarium, covering all 7 continents, as well as special locations on the Moon and Mars. You can download the landscape for the Walkway Over The Hudson from this page as well (it's under "North America").

Download the Landscape:

WalkwayScreenshot.png Walkway Over The Hudson, New York Eric Myers CC-BY-NC 0.11.x English
Walkway Over The Hudson Historic State Park spans the Hudson river in the state of New York between Poughkeepsie and Highland. It was originally a railroad bridge, which was completed in 1889 and was in service until 1974, when it was closed after a fire. The bridge is 1.28 miles long, with the center deck 212 feet above the river (which is at sea level -- the river actually flows both directions with the ocean tides far inland beyond Poughkeepsie). The bridge was later refurbished into a pedestrian walkway, which opened in 2009, becoming the longest footbridge in the world.

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How to Install Landscapes in Stellarium

The steps for installing a new landscape in Stellarium are straightforward. It looks like there are a lot of them, only because I give enough detail that you shouldn't go wrong.
  1. First, download the landscape package file (it's a single ZIP file, and you don't have to unpack it).
  2. Start Stellarium, and open the "Sky & Viewing Options" menu, either by pressing F4, or by moving the mouse to the left side of the screen to reveal the sidebar menu, and clicking on "Sky & Viewing Options window".
  3. Select the "Landscape" tab along the top, as shown here:

  4. Under "Options", be sure to check both "Show ground" and "Use associated planet and position", as shown above. (Why "associated planet"? Because Stellarium can also show you a view of the sky from other planets.)
  5. Press the button at the bottom labeled "Add/remove landscapes...", as shown above.
  6. The "Add/Remove Landscapes" menu will appear. Under "Add a new landscape" check the box for "Switch to the new landscape after installation", as shown below. Then press the button marked "Install a new lansdcape from a ZIP archive..."

  7. Find and select the ZIP file containing the landscape you downloaded, then press "Open".
  8. The landscape should now be installed. Press the "×" at the upper right corner of each menu box to exit that menu.
  9. Before you exit the "Landscape" menu, if you check the box for "Use this landscape as default" then it will be used automatically the next time you start Stellarium.
Troubleshooting: These instructions are for automatic installation of landscapes using the newest release of Stellarium. If it doesn't work, you may have an older version of Stellarium. If that is the case, you can simply update by downloading and installing the latest version of Stellarium, from Stellarium.org
 

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