I've been watching the tutorial videos and reading the threads here and elsewhere, and something I haven't grasped. In the polar alignment tutorial, everything (IIRC) is set to "Simulator" and yet there's a star image used. Am I seeing that wrong? If not, where does the image come from? When I tried, I get an image of snow and that's that. Obviously, when outside set up looking at the sky it's a different story. I'm interested in how to do this when the skies are cloudy, etc.
As already said you need GSC installed to see stars when using the mount and CCD simulator.
The idea of using the simulator is to let you practice doing an alignment. The alignment you do is not real so don't assume that if its cloudy the actual alignment of your mount will be correct, for that you need real stars.