M42 in Stellarium Copy/Paste Failure

Sequence Generator
1

I was showing a friend how to use SGP. I did a Stellarium copy/paste and got funny results.

The “copy” from Stellarium with a ctrl-c:
Great Nebula in Orion
M 42 - NGC 1976 - Sh 2-281 - LBN 974 - Ced 55d
Type: HII region (EN+RN; 3, 2, 3)
Magnitude: 4.00
Surface brightness: 13.07
RA/Dec (J2000.0): 5h35m17.31s/-5°23’28.0"
Hour angle/DE: 15h57m56.85s/-5°22’58.7"
Az/Alt: +74°12’34.8"/-26°57’24.1"
Mean Sidereal Time: 21h34m5.8s
Apparent Sidereal Time: 21h34m5.4s
Size: +1°30’00" x +1°00’00"
Orientation angle: 90°
Distance: 0.412±0.018 kpc (1343.9±58.7 ly)
Redshift: 0.000096±0.000009
Morphological description: irregular form, conventional structure, brightest.

Highlighting the RA field in SGP and doing a ctrl-v paste didn’t put the correct RA and Dec in. The pasted RA turned out to be the Apparent Sidereal Time and the Dec was the Size. I have to admit that it is the only time I’ve ever seen the copy/.paste fail, but it is on a really common object.

2

@Steve_Boerner

Is this the default copy of a Stellarium object with no user adjustments? We can make the copy / paste feature more tolerant of it.

There are a couple recent posts floating around with thoughts on this:

and

3

Yep, what I pasted above and described was the unmodified result of a copy (ctrl-v) in Stellarium and then a paste (ctrl-c) in SGP’s RA field. I do have the Name field checked in Stellarium

Oh, and after a bit of playing I should mention that I see the problem with All Available and Customized checked in Stellarium but not when Short is checked.

4

Alright. I found the problem. In order to support this, we match patterns that hold the data we are after. Unfortunately one of the patterns was aggressive enough to match the Stellarium “Apparent Sidereal Time” as RA and “Size” as Dec. A better version of this will be available in 2.6.0.21 or higher.