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So how can people make a personal connection to the sky?
That’s a good question.
So, I’m an astronomer, I have lots of different reasons for looking at different bits of the sky.
But what’s the bit of the sky that’s most obvious for people to look at?
And I’m told by non-astronomer friends that you want to look directly up.
So what’s directly above my head right now? And that’s the idea behind Personal Space.
So this is the page you see when you first land on Personal Space.
We’ve drawn in the constellation lines for you to make it slightly easier to see where you are
and the boundaries between the constellations as well.
The idea behind Personal Space, though, is to find your Personal Space so let’s write some information here in the form.
We’ve got some example text, so let’s use that.
I’ll say my name is Jane Doe and that today is my birthday, why not?
And, I’m going to be where I am, which is in Oxford.
I start to type in Oxford and it presents me with a list of places and I’m going to pick Oxford, United Kingdom.
And we’re going to say that Jane likes to celebrate her birthday at the right time,
so let’s pick noon and put in 12 o’clock.
Right, so I will then click to find my space.
And you see that the sky whizzes round and shows me that purple circle, that’s Jane Doe’s Personal Space.
And up in the top left hand side here we see a couple of indicators.
One is showing us that her Personal Space overlaps with some other people’s, so
if I do that little drop-down list I can see that we’ve got Rob and Paco here
both have Personal Spaces overlapping with Jane’s.
These are other people that have filled in the form.
And then we’ve also got a list of deep sky objects that can be seen.
So, if I browse my mouse here you can see them pop up on the sky. This one at the top is M76.
It says here that’s the ‘Little Dumbbell’. Let’s go and look at M76, zoom in there,
and you can see the Little Dumbbell is called that because it looks like a little dumbbell!
And that’s a planetary nebula. Now at that point I could go and learn more about
the little dumbbell or nebulae in general, maybe on Wikipedia,
or even I could observe this object using the GLORIA network.