Tapping the Search button in the toolbar brings up the Search panel. This allows you to search for objects using various criteria and add them to or remove them from the Galaxy View.
There are 4 sections in the Search panel.
If you are searching for a specific object, type its name in the search text field and then tap search. By default the search does a “contains” search, looking for the search text anywhere in the name. Thus a search for “Magellanic” will find both the “Large Magellanic Cloud” and the “Small Magellanic Cloud”.
By starting your search string with a vertical bar “|”, you can change the search to “start with”. In this case, only object names that start with the search text will be found.
If you don’t want to search for a specific object, but instead want to search using the criteria below, leave the search text field blank.
By default, all types of objects are included in a search, If you want to restrict the search to a particular class of objects, just uncheck the ones you want excluded.
This section allows you to search for objects with properties that fall into certain ranges. The properties are based upon what you would see from Earth. You can can specify a range for:
• Magnitude
• Distance
• Apparent Size
• Right Ascension
• Declination
• Age (open clusters only)
• Metallicity (stars and globular clusters only)
Leave any fields blank that you don’t want considered. You can also specify an open ended search by leaving either the upper or lower bound blank. Thus to search for all stars brighter than 3 magnitude, you would leave the lower bound blank and enter a “3” in the upper bound.
Use the picker in this section to search for objects only within a particular constellation (as viewed from Earth), Choose the top item “All Constellations” to search all constellations.
You can reset the search parameters to their default state using the Reset button. Since the Search panel remembers the setting of your last search, this can be useful to quickly get back to the default settings.
After the search, a new panel slides in showing the objects found. Using the buttons at the bottom of the view, you can choose to:
• Add all objects to the Galaxy View
• Replace all objects in the Galaxy View with those found
• Remove the found objects from the Galaxy View
By tapping or clicking on any object in the search results, you can see the Object Info for that object.