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No worries, hope you solve your mystery. The cardboard or plastic Planisphere wheel and a red torch are are great tool every budding astronomer should keep in their kit. The iPad version is the electronic equivalent.
I use Stellarium on an iPad rather than PC but I also use Sky Safari. I really like the way Stellarium handles time on the iPad as it allows you to simply drag forward or backward in time with your thumb. When you let go time reverts to 1x speed. On the PC version you need to click on the fast forward or backward arrows multiple times to change the rate from 1x to 10x, 100x etc. (At least my old PC version still has that unless they’ve changed it).
In Stellarium try this.
Look south and place E at the left just off screen and W at the right just off screen and get a slightly curved horizon view. You can bring E and W into view but you’ll have to zoom out which will curve the horizon more. Nothing wrong with that and it will resemble a real Planisphere when curved anyway. The curve is the result of trying to flatten a sphere.
What you want to do is turn on the Celestial (RA/Dec) grid (bluish/green colour) and centre the celestial South Pole toward the top of screen (say 3/4 way up). Now turn on time shift forward to see how the sky rotates as the Earth is turning. If the Sun comes up the stars will vanish but to get them back turn off the atmosphere (cloud button). I think Stellarium has the best twilight colours of any similar type program, very realistic!
If you find Canopus you can see it follows a circle around the South Celestial Pole (SCP) and is almost circumpolar, I.e. never sets from your latitude. (almost but not quite which means it will set for a few hours, 22:30 till 4 presently, changes with date)
Now if you also turn on the Azimuth grid (red colour) and perform the same time shift with Canopus you can see it just gets past 225 deg Az at about 45 deg altitude and then starts moving south again as it sets.
Now put the N horizon in the middle and at 20:30 you can see Arcturus about 35 deg high slightly east of N. It will be on the meridian, (culminate and due north) at 21:20 at just under 39 deg altitude after which it will begin to set which it will do a few hours later in the WNW. Note daily time shift is approx 4 min which is approx 30 minutes per week, 1 hour per fortnight, 2 hours per month or 24 hours per year. In other words Arcturus is at due north at 21:20 on 9 July 2020 and at exactly the same position at 19:20 in one months time but the Sun would have just set and you’ll have to wait for the sky to get darker before you see it by which time it will be further NW.
Enjoy!
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