Celestia Forums

Oh. My God.

I LOVE this book. I must see this program, somehow!!!

Good News Just got an email from Chris answering my resent email from 11 days ago. Chris was apparently very busy professionally in the past. He definitely plans to return to Celestia development as soon as a first release of a new graphical software is done that he was in charge of developing at w...

Well, I've asked about where Celestia is going a number of times, and at the end of the day it just ends up with lots of keen, well-intentioned developers agreeing that something needs to be done... but not much actually happening. If Chris is out of contact and remains so then we simply aren't goin...

Thanks for the links and tutorials folks, I'll try out what Fridger suggested. I was actually thinking about earth-like planets... I was ultimately wondering how easy it would be to come up with cloud maps that had the cloud bands and cyclones etc like Earth does... but I do think it's better to sta...

Unfortunately, the person who does most of Celestia's graphics development and the person who packages Celestia for a "final release" are one and the same. And Chris seems to be taking a vacation from it. All the more reason to get 1.4.0 finalised then... if he is taking a break (or abandoning) it,...

If there's going to be no more development for a while (or at least, we seem to have reached a very long pause in it), would it be possible to officially finalised and release the latest prerelease as the final version of 1.4.0 for now? Given 1.4.0pre6 is already vastly superior to 1.3.2, it's a sha...

Does anyone here make their own global cloudmaps from scratch for earth-like planets? Is it even possible to do (they are quite complex things, since you have to worry about transparency)? Or do you usually just recycle an cloudmap from earth? If you do custom build them, can you share any tips for ...

How close is the first planet to the star? I'm just thinking that tidal forces would disrupt the orbits of moons that are orbiting it rather rapidly (I think they'd spiral in and hit the planet).

So when people look at iron asteroids, what they are really looking at is part of an iron shell with in a star that was ejected. Quite apart from being completely on the wrong track with this (and Caro nicely explained how it actually works), iron asteroids are most likely the remnants of the expos...

Yeah, and they're estimating it as 1-2 jupiter masses, there's no way something that small could be a brown dwarf. You need a minimum of about 13 jupiter masses to qualify as that.

Hmm. Ok then. 2000K still sounds like a lot though!

We sure this isn't an april fool? I mean, maybe the star is only a million years old but it sounds bloody strange that a planet 100 AU from a star less massive than our sun still ends up with a temperature of 2000 Kelvin. That sounds WAY too hot for a planet that far from the star, even for such a y...

Yes, that's true of course. I didn't know a short word for it: century, millenium, ...? (millions-and-millions-of-years-or-what?) I guess "aeon" works for a timespan of millions of years. Geologists use "Periods" for spans lasting tens of millions of years and "Eras" for hundreds of millions of yea...

Could we seed the new algorithm with the ability for galaxy evolution? I mean - not really implement it, but lay out parameters and eventually a virtual interface so that it's easy, in a later stage, to see galaxies evolving by only providing a time parameter? I would like to see galaxies changing ...

nice!

Yeah. Again, your posts are not about Physics or Astronomy, they are about presenting your fictional universe (and no, saying it's supposed to be our universe in the future is not a valid excuse - it's still entirely conjectural, not not very firmly based on reality anyway). That sort of thing is fi...

Well, it's kinda reassuring that me and Fridger at least agree on where Celestia should be headed .

I think what Fridger is trying to say in his characteristically undiplomatic way is basically what I was saying earlier - that there will just be chaos if we just leave it to ALL members to contribute to Celestia's core development. First, because of the large number of people involved, and secondly...

1) Precession of the equinoxes. 2) Stars with the same coordinates in stars.dat and in an stc do not plot in the same position. 3) The Earth is 200AU from the coordinate origin, which introduces huge parallax effects for nearby stars, but this has not been rectified because it would "break cel URLs...

I agree with Christophe here. There are so many people on the boards and Celestia is such a great application. Why not allow a larger group of people contribute? I know that many times quantity is the opposite of quality, but I don't think that is true for open source. -Codrin Possibly because "too...