Celestia Forums

Bing clearly wins this round!

Hungry4info wrote:Why? There's a ~100 Earth-mass planet in our solar system with less surface gravity than Earth. Clearly the planet's mass can't be the only deciding factor in the surface gravity.

Since when does Saturn have a surface?

My gut feeling says is should look something like P = |Y| + Y/(X-Y) Where Y is positive when the satellite rotates in the same direction as the planet and negative when it's in a retrograde orbit. Let's say X = 24 and Y =1 then the result for P = 1 + 1/23 which is a little more than one hour, an exp...

Please stop saying that people who prefer Mac OS to Windows (or Macs to other PC's) are fanboys. It makes me a little sad. The trade is actually very simple. Apple doesn't make 'cheap' products and that's something you pay for. In return you get a balanced out system which is a pleasure to use. The ...

They light grey colour could be caused by sublimated CO2 or water vapour. There's a lot of dry ice and water ice to be found on Mars, especially in the shadow side of craters near the poles. An example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Sublimation_Of_Ice_In_Martian_Spring.jpg...

[b] And incidentally - none of this, obviously, happens with a Neutron star because a Neutron star does not have an event horizon - because it isn't a black hole. Just a few mental experiments: A bubble filled with air at Earth's atmospheric pressure (at sea level), but about as large as the size o...

A theoretical sufficiently large neutron star could have an event horizon (how such an object could form is a different question altogether). But that alone black hole it doesn't entirely make. Besides having an event horizon, a true black hole is supposed to be a singularity.

The rock was given to Willem Drees, a former Dutch leader, during a global tour by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin following their moon mission 50 years ago. It's a setup :) Drees was a socialist. A good one, mind me, but in most American eyes probably socialist enough to be...

You could set Celestia to run full screen and then tab to your applications... http://bob.pinkmirrors.com/celestia/cel1s.jpg Didn't know windows had this feature however... Except for the fact that it's gobbling up just about al of my CPU-cycles - which makes mu MacBook Pro sorta noisy and hot - th...

rthorvald wrote:To rotate a selected object, ALT-click and drag across the mousepad. All the rest is conveniently listed in Celestia?s Help menu...

- rthorvald

And use two-finger scrolling (switch-on-able in the Trackpad prefs in System Preferences) to change the distance from the selected object.

There is a Celestia-like 3D solar system simulation for the iPhone called 'GrandTour' and then there are several more traditional 2D stellarium like apps (planispheres). 'Star Walk' and 'Starmap' pop to mind.

Well, I don't 'require' it, but I wouldn't mind seeing it here.

I often press 'enter' when I want to invoke a Google search, and I regularly mix up Celestia controls with Google Earth controls (pressing the wrong mouse butto to rotate a body's surface).

Celestia has always been running and installing fine on all my macs so the problem is probably on your side. If you don't have admin rights, try installing it in the folder Users/yourhomefolder/Applications If you are an admin, and can't install in either Applications-folder, repairing your disk per...

For reference, some real shots: http://www.phillyskyline.com/misc/wallpaper_070829.jpg http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/panasonic/dmc_fx100-review/nightshot.jpg http://mavsurfer.smugmug.com/gallery/4833595_za2to#287662892_fxG7C-M-LB http://www.creativephotoimages.org/images/gallery/Richard%20Knisbe...

Talking from my own experience with photography: When I take a picture of a skyline like this, I generally need an exposure of about 0,5 to 10 seconds depending on circumstances, aperture and ISO. For taking a picture of the moon, while still being able to see any detail on the surface (using simila...

I underestimated the length of the lens obviously. With the focal lens you used the disk of the moon should fit about 13 times - side by side - horizontally. So the angular size of the moon seems about right. On the other two accounts: yes :) The moon should be fuller and brighter. Since it's so clo...

The phase of the moon suggests that the sun is about to rise, so the sky seems too dark for the moment of the day. The size of the moon also seems a bit unrealistic. I have a feeling you didn't take the picture with a (long) telephoto lens (a high magnification, so to say) so the moon should be smal...

Reading this thread I'm suddenly thinking something along the lines of the pop-up names of applications in the OS X dock:

Maybe this can be of some help:

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/