Celestia Forums

Well, I'll be adding them to the new OA systems when we make them; but they are available from the OA Celestia Yahoo group already. (in the files section). Using a variety of semitransparent cloud overlays and ring systems the total number of different options can be pushed up into the hundreds.

Ten Jupiter-like gas giants
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/3382/gasgiantsay4.jpg
all made from chopped up images of Jupiter, but very much altered and edited.
Still, I've tried to keep the colours within reasonable limits...

Do you suppose that white dwarf is close enough for mass transfer to occur?
If so the white dwarf might blow up occasionally. That could be interesting...

When I made the Orion's Arm main addon I put loads of planets from several different systems on one .ssc file;

now I wish I hadn't. It helps if you put each planetary system on a different .ssc, just so you can find them later to edit them.

This page has a diagram which shows the direction of winds on Earth due to atmospheric circulation. http://www.auf.asn.au/meteorology/section4.html Overlay this diagram on your crater-world, and imagine the effects of the prevailing winds on the distribution of water vapour; the wind will blow the r...

Temporarily I've placed Darwin system in Orion constellation (between Betelgeuse and Bellatrix) because I couldn't find an information where Darwin System should be... Any suggestions? Thanks. Since the system is entirely fictional, you can put it anywhere you like. No information about RA and Dec ...

I believe you will find that the bright stars may be concentrated in the spiral arms, as Ajtribick has indicated; but older stars, including Sun-like stars, will be more evenly distributed, as they have had time to migrate out of the arms and distribute themselves more evenly. So if you are looking ...

Actually I would refer interested parties to this topic over at Bautforum; http://www.bautforum.com/questions-answers/80772-oblate-neutron-stars.html there the member Timb finds that very young, millisecond pulsars would be reasonably oblate, despite their huge gravity; and after a re-think, Grant H...

Is there a hi-res Mercury texture available yet, by the way?

http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/294/frisbeeti0.th.jpg http://img129.imageshack.us/img129/9608/daedalusjl8.th.jpg A couple of ships from the Orion's Arm scenario; the first is loosely based on a design by Robert Frisbee of NASA The second is based on Project Daedalus, a design by the British Inte...

This is a comparison between the planet HAT-P-1b and Jupiter; HAT-P-1b is actually less massive than Jupiter, if the data is correct, but it is much wider because it has expanded due to its high temperature. http://eg.orionsarm.com/im_store/behemoth.jpg I've used this image on this page in Orion's A...

I've noticed that too.
The planet, without the rings, is a very dim object- perhaps the image that has been obtained of this world is mostly an image of the ring system - either that or the planet is whiter than Venus.

Basically I cheated. The dust disk is just a transparent png on a billboard; I made a really thin billboard, then duplicated it so that it appears just above and below the plane of the planet's orbit. There is a useful tool in Gimp called 'whirl and pinch' which can make ring-shaped blurs. The star ...

I've changed the dimensions of the dust ring, so that the planet now orbits in (nearly) dust-free space. That makes it easier to see them both together. Here's an image of the new version- http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/8477/fomalhautbwz9.th.png http://img152.imageshack.us/images/thpix.gif I've ...

I thought (from the images in the news) that there was a thinner dust disk that stretched nearly to the star- but it seems that the main disk - an 'eccentric' disk to boot- is outside of the planet. This planet formed way, way further out than anything in our solar system- from disk instability perh...

That's very nice, ajtribick . Thanks. I've added a disk to Fomalhaut in my copy of Celestia, but they are so different in scale I can't get them to display together yet. So here's a cut-n-paste job. http://img386.imageshack.us/img386/7688/fomli9.th.jpg http://img386.imageshack.us/images/thpix.gif

For the far future Earth in the Orion's Arm scenario, I personally use the 18000 bc model by Don Edwards; after the oil runs out, and the great mass of humanity have left the planet, the world becomes a nature reserve; in this condition the world enters the next ice age, complete with retroengineere...

My daughter's boyfriend (bright lad; only 16) suggested to me that gravity would be very much greater than centrifugal force on these objects. And it looks like he was right. Thanks, people; the fact that gravity is on the order of 75 million times greater than centrifugal force would mean that a pu...

For the OA project, I'm making a Celestia model of a nearby neutron star, Geminga; the excellent pulsar models by Cham are an inspiration, but I wanted to see if I could make one from first principles. But I've got a question. Should the central object be flattened by its rotation? here is a movie (...

A youtube video of a single-stage-to-orbit scramjet Waverider spaceship I've just made
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_d_dqGIRqw

This is based on the British HOTOL concept
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOTOL
crossed with a waverider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverider