NavList:

Brooke, I don't claim to be a Stellarium or CN expert, but I have used Stellarium quite a bit in my CN work. Here are some of the things that I have learned about Stellarium from just experimenting with it.

First off, make sure you have entered your exact Lat/Lon in the "Location" tab (left side of screen).  You could use the default coordinates for your city from the long list on Stellarium, but I think that this will give your location based on where the center of your city is or the location of the main Post Office in your city. Label your location beginning with 'AAA (like 'AAABrooke) so as to force your location to the top of the list, making it easy to find (Frank gave me this tip).

While you have the mouse pointer on a particular celestial body, Left Click on it and on the left side of the screen will be data about the CB. You can add/subrtract from the list using the View tab. Be sure to add "Navigational Stars" . Additional navigational info will be displayed when you click on these stars. Some of the data will have "apparant" after the displayed value. If you get rid of the atmosphere (lower toolbar), you will see the word "apparant" disappear. What you are doing is correcting for refraction as you toggle the atmosphere button.

Stellarium assumes a HOE of zero and no index or instrument error. Stellarium seems to be extremely accurate.

It's interesting to observe the effet of parallax by displaying the altitude of a CB and toggling between geocentric and topocentric positions - stars don't change position at all, but the moon does by quite a bit (by its PAX).

I could go on, but I will leave it to other NavListers to explain additional things about Stellarium or correct anything that I have gotten wrong.

Homer