Celestia Forums

This is interesting. Gliese 581 C is only 50% bigger than Earth and in the star's habitable zone.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 ... lanet.html

Blimey, you're right! That did improve things a bit. Cheers!

If anyone's interested, I bought the machine I mentioned, and it's pretty good. The performance is very fast even with 32k virtual textures + a 32k spec map. If you add any more VTs it grinds to a halt and 64k VTs seem to be beyond it. Not bad for $800 though.

Could you give us a link to it?

Thank you so much for this advice! Looks like this system does have 1GB of RAM, so maybe I'll give it a try and see what happens.

Thanks again!

I'm thinking of getting a new laptop. :D It's for work, but it would be fun if it improved my Celestia experience too. I believe nVidia cards are best for Celestia, right? The laptop I'm interested in comes with an nVidia GeForce Go 6150 video card. But I read somewhere that this is an 'integrated' ...

This is how it feels to be a second class planet. Pluto just got its minor planet number. From now on, it's 134340 Pluto. How demeaning!.

http://www.newscientistspace.com/articl ... -list.html

Far out!!

http://space.com/news/060327_dawn_mission.html

Hurrah and huzzah!

Titan + rings + Janus = whoah!

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... 055798.jpg

Darn it. And JAXA sucks too. This is depressing. Is it me or is Western civilization disappearing down the plughole? Time to start learning Chinese...

Depressing news. As a small consolation, the ESA has an interesting asteroid mission in the pipeline called Don Quijote. Looks like it's still a long way in the future, but it's something to pin our hopes to. http://www.esa.int/gsp/completed/neo/donquijote.html http://www.esa.int/gsp/NEO/ Maybe ESA ...

There is now an official 'Where NH is Now' page on the New Horizons website:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php

A perfect launch! Good luck, NH!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newho ... index.html

Wonderful!

New names have been announced for some of Uranus's smaller moons. They are all from Shakespearean plays. S/2003 U2 = Cupid (from Timon of Athens) S/1986 U10 = Perdita (from The Winter's Tale) S/2003 U1 = Mab (from Romeo and Juliet) S/2001 U3 = Francisco (from The Tempest) S/2003 U3 = Margaret (from ...

I think Cerberus is perfect because he was another guardian of the underworld, like Charon. I can't recall any other guardians, though. Persephone, the wife of Pluto, would also be perfect, but I suspect they'll give that name to 2003 UB313 if it's proven to be a planet.

For those who care about such things, S/2003 U3 (a moon of Uranus) has been named Margaret (rather bland choice, but whatever...) and S/2003 N1 (a moon of Neptune) has been named Psamathe (don't read this post out loud, you'll get spittle on your monitor). For those who don't care about such things ...

I don't read Japanese, but I'm guessing 'Point A' and 'Point B' are the proposed landing sites, right?

Behold the strangeness!!!

http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/j/snews/2005/11 ... busa.shtml