Online planetarium site for identifying stars at your location

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Art
Here's a link to a site which is great for beginners such as myself. You can set it for your own location and time. It identifies the stars and galaxies you can see at any moment looking in different directions. http://www.astronomy-page.com/open_planetarium.php

btw out of curiosity and probably a daft question but if the methods used to calculate distances in the universe were wrong and distances are smaller than thought would this nullify the need for dark matter to explain galaxy formations?
 
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There is also this http://www.fourmilab.ch/skyscrsv/ planerarium screensaver which shows you the sky for the current time.

No it's still necessary for Galaxies to have 10-100x as much gravitiational mass than we can see as visible stars. This is necessary for the galaxy to hold together as it rotates.
Forming galaxies in the first palce is a whole different problem.
 
mgb_phys said:
There is also this http://www.fourmilab.ch/skyscrsv/ planerarium screensaver which shows you the sky for the current time.

No it's still necessary for Galaxies to have 10-100x as much gravitiational mass than we can see as visible stars. This is necessary for the galaxy to hold together as it rotates.
Forming galaxies in the first palce is a whole different problem.
Looks interesting. Any idea what folder you need to copy the screensaver into in Vista in order to run it?

Isn't gravity inversely proportional to the square of the distance? So if the distances were less than thought wouldn't gravity based on known masses suffice to hold galaxies together in their formations?
 
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Thank you Art :D, it's nice of you to say that, i really appreciate it. (FYI I'm the webmaster of astronomy-page.com, and it so happens that I found this page completely by chance!) I didn't actually develop the planetarium myself, but it's under GPL so I can reproduce and modify it if I like. All the rest is mine!