Celestia Forums

Hi Celestians, Here's a stupid question that has been bugging me this week. Maybe someone can help me out with it. It all started when I was using Celestia is a planetarium and noted that the colouring of the Moon in Celestia does not reflect what it actually looks like to the human eye. We all know...

There's a picture of Ganesa Macula at the bottom of this page from the Planetary Society.

http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/titan_lpsc_0819.html

Apparently it may be a cryovolcanic dome of some sort.

Fantastic!! I love this!

Wooo-ha! This is the coolest thing ever! You guys rock!!

I believe you can use IrfanView to convert dds files to jpg. It can also do batch conversion, to speed up the process of converting the large numbers of files in VTs.

http://www.irfanview.com

This is a very beautiful addon! I had great fun flying around it. The only problem I found was that when you get very low, the Golden Gate bridge looks very weird, as if it has fallen over. I wonder if there is a 3-d model of the bridge that could be used alongside this texture?

Wow! That atmosphere tool is fantastic! This could improve my life...

Hey, you're like me! Well meaning but lacking in skills. :( But that's great. People like you and I can help a lot. :) If, while using Celestia, you don't understand anything, or need some advice, just ask about it on these boards. That way, others in the same situation can learn things. And more im...

That question can't be answered unless you tell us about yourself. :D Do you have any skills? Are you a programmer? Are you good with Photoshop and other image manipulation tools? Do you have an expert knowledge of astrophysics? Are you good at designing 3-D models? Do you enjoy creating fictional p...

I suspected it would be something like that. Thanks for the info...

Hello Celestians, I had always assumed that specular textures cannot be handled by my graphics card. Specularity never appears on Celestia's Earth whatever I do. I also noted that my card does not have the "GL_ARB_vertex_program" mentioned in Selden's 'Preliminary User's FAQ' and which apparently pe...

For those who care about such things, some of the tiny Jovian moons discovered in 2003 were recently given names by the IAU. You might want to update your 'numbered moons' ssc file. Incidentally, J22/Thelxinoe seems to be missing from that file. 2002 J1 = Arche 2003 J1 = Eukelade 2003 J6 = Helike 20...

Thank you everyone for your advice, I've edited it into the FAQ. I'm very grateful for your patience with my questions.

TSB

Hjw,

The choice between DXT3/DXT5 depends on what you want to do (specularmaps/cloudmaps/normalmaps).

What exactly is the choice here? Why might one choose to use DXT5 instead of 3? How would it affect a cloud map or normalmap, for example?

Thanks in advance,

TSB

Thanks people, this is great stuff!

hjw, Thank you very much for this information, I will rewrite the FAQ accordingly. Two questions: (1) Alpha channels are for textures with transparent sections, right? So a normal planet texture wouldn't need an alpha channel? But if I were converting a cloud map to DDS, would I need to use one of t...

Hi,

If you look on the 'Celestia Users' forum you'll find t00fri's excellent and completely up-to-date textures of Titan and Iapetus.

For the other moons, check out Steve Albers' page:

http://laps.fsl.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html

Thanks, that's much better!

Thank you for your help, Harry, I appreciate it and I will rework the posting accordingly.

By the way, what exactly does it mean to say that JPG images provide better image quality - what's better about them, exactly?

Thanks again,

TSB

Hello Celestians, I have written the following for Windows users like myself who know nothing about image manipulation but are trying to learn how to use .DDS textures in Celestia. For many of you, what I have written will seem like the bleeping obvious. But it wasn't bleeping obvious to me. There i...