Celestia Forums

@Fridger: you're right, it's only useful for displaying a view of the Milky Way from the surroundings of the Solar system. And of course I agree that the ultimate goal should be to render everything in 3D in a way that resembles the ESO picture. Until we have the ability to add dark/reflection nebul...

ESO has published a beautiful 6000 x 3000 pixel panorama of the Milky Way, made by Serge Brunier with a regular digital camera ( http://www.sergebrunier.com/gallerie/pleinciel/index-eng.html , this page also includes a link to an online full screen 3D interactive panorama). It can be downloaded here...

There is a new version: I just downloaded the 1.2.0 beta from this page: http://www.orihalcon.jp/mitakaplus/index_e.html#download.

I see, good to know. This of course makes it impossible to create nebulae that are not purely emissive. I would be interested to see what can be created with depth sorted sprites and to see how large the performance impact is. Is this something that is easy to add as an option?

Buzz

I have started some simple experiments with point sprites. What I am trying to do is to obscure "emission nebulae" by dark nebula. I am using a partly transparant png as the texture. Although I am not using "blend add", the opaque sprites always appear in front of the transparant ones, even if they ...

Oops, no I didn't have them turned on! I do see the 'spriteneb' now, thanks Chris!

I want to find out how point sprites work, and installed Chris' spriteneb addon as a first step. The add-on is found in Celestia, but when I go to it I don't see anything. OpenGL 2.0 was used. I am running Vista home premium 32 bits with an ATI 2600 XT. I was wondering if this could have anything to...

Hm, yes, the thought crossed my mind. I found the announcement here: http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t29101.html. Use at your own risk I guess!

I had problems with full screen display of Celestia in Vista: the refresh rate was really low, 60 Hz I think. Updating drivers did not help. What did help was a little tool called Direct Refresh: [direct link removed, see my next message]

Hi Eelco, Thank you for your extensive post! But I'm afraid your suggestion is not correct. I had a look at the Powers of Ten again, and confirmed it is something else. The Powers or Ten is very nice; its simplicty is its strength: there are no camera movements, the camera just zooms out, while show...

Well, actually I have a better, larger version (13 MB mpeg) that I downloaded from somewhere years ago, and I cannot find out where it comes from! It is a bit different from the youtube version, as it travels the other way: from outside the Milky Way towards Earth, and it does not include the rather...

Does anybody happen to know what documentary this clip is from? I have known it for quite some time and keep wondering...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wskk3U1k-w

As I wrote before, the "glowing moons" don't work for me. This time I wanted to see some examples. An illustration of what Selden said can be seen on APOD: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060622.html . Planets do have a halo here, but their interior is washed out with a uniform colour. Buzz PS: I...

I am glad you agree at least partially! Here is a link to a picture of the effect in an earlier topic:
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10080&start=90

Hello All, I haven't contributed to the forum for a while, but now I'd like to say someting about the new planet and star rendering. I do understand showing halos around planets is meant to give an impression of higher brightness, but it does not work for me. To me the impression is of a luminous ob...

There are some nice movies too! Have a look here: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/videos.cfm?categoryID=17&subCategoryID=52
"A View from Huygens - Jan. 14, 2005" and "Titan Descent Data Movie with Bells and Whistles" are quite nice.

Very nice! I especially like the ground view.

That does not mean it cannot be exciting in the future.

There are very high resolution textures for parts of Earth, and human scale models like Stonehenge. So if one would zoom in to regions like that, a nice experience is definitely possible! Edit: Selden has made some very nice addons showing the galaxy distributions in the distant universe, so zooming...