Celestia Forums

I imagine such an impact would leave an impressive "bruise" on the gas giant's cloudtops as well. Think of the Shoemaker-Levy impact magnified a million times! Later!

J P

UPDATE! On 08/12/2008, at 12:10:40 UTC, the NH spacecraft reached 1600 million km from the sun. The spacecraft's distance from Earth, by comparison, is 1.511 billion km. NH is now only 3.123 billion km from Pluto and traveling at a rate of 16.767 km/s. Later!

J P

UPDATE! On 06/04/2008, at 18:05:25 UTC, the NH spacecraft reached 1500 million km from the sun. The spacecraft's distance from Earth, by comparison, is 1.352 billion km. NH is now only 3.219 billion km from Pluto and traveling at a rate of 16.921 km/s. Saturn orbit crossing is now just 4 days away. ...

Luckily, white dwarfs tend to last a while. Yeah, I read on some site depicting the sun's lifetime that stated the sun as a white dwarf will take 25 trillion years to cool to a mini red dwarf and then an additional 75 trillion more years to cool down to a dead black dwarf body. Talk about long last...

This could indicate that Celestia needs to support another spectral type for objects cooler than T dwarfs. Then again, at ~650 K, the amount of visible radiation produced will be quite small, which raises interesting rendering issues, particularly if Y dwarfs exist in multiple star systems. Well, t...

UPDATE! On 03/28/2008, at 16:30:15 UTC, the NH spacecraft reached 1400 million km from the sun. The spacecraft's distance from Earth, by comparison, is 1.372 billion km. NH is now only 3.314 billion km from Pluto and traveling at a rate of 18.628 km/s. Later!

J P

Yeah, I experience this problem whenever I create binary systems where a bright star is orbited by a red dwarf. In my case, it seems that the dimmer the companion star, the faster it disappears. BTW, I have no problems with stars of O-G class range. Later!

J P

Any plans to incorporate this into celestia? Or do we not have enough data. Using the data I've seen so far, I simply edited the Rhea entry in the default solarsys.ssc file to this: "Rhea" "Sol/Saturn" { Texture "rhea.*" Radius 764 CustomOrbit "rhea" EllipticalOrbit { Period 4.517500 SemiMajorAxis ...

UPDATE! On 01/21/2008, at 05:10:15 UTC, the NH spacecraft reached 1300 million km from the sun. The spacecraft's distance from Earth, by comparison, is nearly 1.419 billion km. NH is now only 3.414 billion km from Pluto and traveling at a rate of 19.026 km/s. Later!

J P

Keck, Hubble and other telescopes have displayed some really beautiful new true color images (as well as infrared) which show that Uranus has clouds, dark spots and some real beauty as it gets more and more excited about being closer to the Sun. Thanks, Brain-Dead Actually, Uranus is nearing apheli...

UPDATE! On 11/15/2007, at 11:04:35 UTC, the NH spacecraft reached 1200 million km from the sun. The spacecraft's distance from Earth, by comparison, is nearly 1.332 billion km. NH is now only 3.514 billion km from Pluto and traveling at a rate of 19.463 km/s. Later!

J P

UPDATE! On 09/10/2007, at 08:36:45 UTC, the NH spacecraft reached 1100 million km from the sun. The spacecraft's distance from Earth, by comparison, is nearly 1.108 billion km. Halfway between the mean orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, NH is now less than 3.616 billion km from Pluto and traveling at a r...

Important milestone! On 07/06/2007, at 21:30:30 UTC, the NH spacecraft reached it's first 1 billion km from the sun. The spacecraft's distance from Earth, by comparison, is 870.4 million km. NH is now less than 3.72 billion km from Pluto and traveling at a rate of 20.6 km/s. Later!

J P

UPDATE! On 05/03/2007, at 00:01:54 UTC, the NH spacecraft reached 900 million km from the sun. The spacecraft's distance from Earth, by comparison, is 772 million km. NH is now less than 3.837 billion km from Pluto and traveling at a rate of 21.31 km/s. Later!

J P

A question, when I use Celestia to simulate the planet, the clouds look pink. if the components of the atmosphere is the same as earth can the sky still look blue? The pinkish color is actually what clouds would look like when illuminated by a red dwarf star. For comparison, a planet in one of my o...

The 3:1 orbital resonance is actually quite an ideal situation for two relatively massive moons to be in. The outer moon would orbit 2.08 times further out from the parent planet than the inner one. This situation is especially ideal with the less massive moon orbiting closer to the much more massiv...

Of course, there's always the possibility of a second trojan satelite sharing the same orbit as Luna. It would have to be either 60 degrees ahead of or behind our moon for the situation to have a chance of reasonable stability, however. Later!

J P

So, just when is 150 - pre3 going to be released? Later!

J P

Whoops! That should have been 3.967 billion km to Pluto! Also, 800 million km equals just under 5.4 AU. Later!

J P

I figured it might be useful to track the progress of New Horizons on it's voyage from Jupiter to Pluto. To kick things off, closest approach to Jupiter occurred at 05:43:40 UTC Feb 28th, at a speed of 22.86 km/s. NH came to within 2.3 million km of Jupiter's center. At 06:07:12 UTC, NH reached yet ...