The Second Life viewer

The way to get into Second Life is using the program (software) that provides Second Life (or any of the other programs accepted by SL, called "third party" or created by others), calling this program installed on our computer VIEWER or CLIENT. The other two main pieces are our Internet conection and the Second Life servers, arranged for that purpose by the company Linden Lab, based in San Francisco, USA.

In the case of viewer, we find all the elements that we will use in our astronomical experiences, internal programs that show the "textures" or images of the day and night, the sky, the sea, the sun, moon, stars, clouds, and the different phases of the day (sunrise, morning, noon, evening, sunset and night). We can also find a series of controls that are going to change the view for default day cycle and can give another color to the sky (from blue to red, for example), doing more darker or transparent sea, put the sky very cloudy or completely clear and cloudless; other of the controls allows us to put a predefined type of day (there is one that interests us more than others, and this gives us a dark night sky without moon and clouds, with a bright and visible stars).

Many residents of Second Life just worry about the effects of daylight, leaving what is default on the viewer, or what the owner has put in the region (some owners are interested have activated the night mode having many lighting effects, for example); but there is also the option of activating the cycle of the day, which can see all the stages of this to pass the hours (in SL cycle is three hours in daylight and one hour with night light, repeated six times for one day in the real world). In the next two sections we will discover as enhance our viewer in the realization of our astronomical research, with both the sun and the duration of the cycle of the day as the stars at night, and too we can activate the night at any time to do so our practices or also perform them during night time cycle to give more realism.

NOTE: if you need read more about the SL time, I write an article about this. PREVIUS PAGE __________________________ MAIN PAGE_____________________________ NEXT PAGE