Celestia Forums

Thanks Selden, it was way to early in the morning for me when I posted.

New extrasolar planet found orbiting HD 147506 dubbed HAT-P-2b. Article points out it is 1.8 times brighter than Jupiter but 8.2 times as massive. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070502_supermassive_planet.html Here is two things about the artice I found that contradicted each other. Dubbed HA...

In honor of Pluto's demotion, I reclassified it as an asteroid in Celestia! ALso while there I chose to correctly name andromeda, Xena, and Gabrielle. And in honor of Futurama, I renamed Uranus to end that stupid joke once and for all! Why would you do that? Even after being demoted, Pluto is still...

Have to say I like this new definition for Pluto. While demoting it actually labeling it a dwarf-planet. I do think it was to big to be an asteroid or comet. Does this mean that Ceres is also a dwarf planet? I would hope because Ceres seems to big and round to be a simple asteroid.

Who do I want to hide from? Well, this is all for a Novel I'm working on (planning) and I was working with the idea of the occupants of a human base somewhere in the solar-system being the only survivors after Earth (and it's other outposts) are wiped clean of life by aliens. I really like the idea...

Is there a minimum size for a planet for it to indefinitely (well, lets say 5 billion years) hold on to its atmospherew ithout it slowly leaking away. Well..lets just say with an earth like atmosphere. It depends on several things - the mass of the planet, the molecular weight of the gas, and the t...

A screenshot I made of the new moons http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/2591/plutonianmoons0xl.png The evil twin moons of Pluto! 8O *scary music* :D Just as long as you realize you could never really terraform Pluto ;). Sure it can hold onto a small ammount of atmosphere at its very cold temperature,...

BlindedByTheLight wrote:P.S. RE: my avatar, Fridger... ever see the "yatta" video?

If not:

http://web.mit.edu/patil/www/media/video/yatta.asf

GREENL!

Man, I love that video. They made a flash of it somewhere in 2001-2002. Funniest stuff ever.

I think the KBO's - of which I'd say PLuto and Charon are two - are in many ways somewhat comparable to the planetoids (asteroids) between the Mars and Jupiter orbits. Pluto is really to big to be considered a simple asteroid. After all its bigger than what scientists consider to be the biggest ast...

In a few centuries some of these names from popular culture might become respectable enough to be suitable for names of exoplanets; after all, many of Uranus' moons are named after characters from The Tempest and The Rape of the Lock . Here are some imaginary OA exoplanets named after classical twe...

WildMoon wrote:I don't mind them calling the planet Xena and it's moon Gabrielle...

That would be horrible, important objects deserve important names imo. If it is to be considered a planet then I think it should follow the naming rules for planets. Naming a planet after a tv show is horrible imo.

Unfortunately don' know the answer to your questions but I seem to remember a thread in which the Evil Dr. said that Triton might not even meet the roche limit and therefore might not break up. Don't quote me on it though .

I just recently switched from pc to mac with a mac mini, I have the 1.42ghz version. and Celestia runs great on it. Just remember to de-comment this line.... "IgnoreGLExtensions [ "GL_ARB_vertex_program" ]" in the config file or Celestia will crash your system.

When I first saw this thread my first thought "wait, would you see stars if you were looking directly at the Earth?". Just think back to the lunar landing images. The lunar surface was very good as washing out the stars and only 2-3 stars were visible in the pictures. So I just had to go and see wha...

That does seem to be the most likely interpretation. *sigh* The actual press release says "far side of the moon." See http://www.deepspaceexpeditions.com/section5-press.html I'm sure some people at NASA are throwing hissy-fits! There's no way they could get someone to the moon by the end of 2010. Y...

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2005-08-10-space-tourists_x.htm NEW YORK (AP) ?€” Space Adventures, the company that has sent "space tourists" up to the International Space Station, is planning a new mission: rocketing rich people around the dark side of the moon. heh I know that I'm knit-picki...

This suggests to me that any classification system is probably useless beyond the absolute broadest classes - since we want to have a class for each terrestrial planet, it could be that every planet is going to be worthy of its own separate class in whatever scheme we come up with, in which case we...

Minor Planet : Any body that is 2000-6000 km in diameter that has characteristics that clearly distinguishes it from asteroids The largest worlds resemble smaller (Mars to Earth-sized) Major Planets. They have the capability to have atmospheres, though these atmospheres tend to be thin. Under some ...

The problem with that is that its not very discriptive of what type of planet you have. For example.... if you have a planet like mercury that is the size of mars. Would you call that a Marsian planet? As our solar system goes there are gonna be many many types of planets. But as the galaxy and univ...

I think the problem is when people think of planet they think of "world" and vice versa. I would just be happy calling the larger KBOs "significant worlds". Because planet or not you would still get that "worldly feeling" if you were to be standing on it, heck you get that feeling just thinking abou...