Celestia Forums

I request the ability to specify an ellipticity for stars, to more accurately model the shapes of the faster-rotating stars which have been found using interferometric methods: http://www.astronomy.com/default.aspx?c=a&id=2792 This should be extremely simple to implement. EDIT: After a bit more ...

What, you mean apart from all those very important things you mentioned??? Doesn't seem very similar to me...

It's a bit of a shame that Celestia doesn't have all those things yet... I just hope they're on the list somewhere.

Cheers,
Paul

Depending on your video driver, you might be able to find a configuration menu where you can temporarily increase the video gamma level. For instance, in Windows 2000 the nVidia control panel found in "Display Properties->Settings->Advanced" has a "Color Management" panel where you can adjust the ga...

Hi Michael, I suspect that another reason you didn't get many replies is because the 'Celestia Development' forum is rather quiet, judging by the paltry number of posts made since I last visited about three months ago. Celestia's ongoing development has slowed greatly in the past two years, possibly...

Change the field of view with the ',' and '.' keys and you should be able to get what you want

Cheers,
Paul

Another useful database for general astronomical data is VizieR:

http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR

Cheers,
Paul

Current common video hardware only allows for integer frame buffers (with some exceptions). In HDR capable cards (floating point color depth frame buffers, 4 channels) retinal overexposition effects would be much more realistic... ..and an "automatic iris" mode will be necessary. I think that you w...

of course, I would tremendously enjoy a sophisticated 3D terrain display. Yet, after all this work that led to a most accurate incorporation of the movements of celestial bodies (remember hundreds of terms in VSOP87 ...) and all the rest, I'd consider it a bad mistake to mix in 3d landscape fiction...

It may be volcanic. The region has a modest history of volcanism. It kind of reminds me of those flat worn-away volcanic domes and craters found in Mauritania and Chad. You can see them reasonably clearly on the 32k Blue Marble texture. The more pronounced version would be Brandberg Massif: http://l...

Having seen (and been disappointed by) quite a few terrain/dynamic-detail renderers, I have to say that I'm really impressed by this one. It doesn't try to do too much, it just concentrates on doing specific things well. The end result is very fast and makes sensible compromises on texturing and pop...

Don, So you're saying that publishing VTX files is okay because an Orbiter user can take potentially dozens (or even hundreds?) of DDS files and spend god knows how many hours putting them back together into a single standard image file format. That is crazy. Not only is that a bucketload of work in...

Don, A virtual texture (.vtx) is Celestia-specific and can't be used in Orbiter (or any other graphics program for that matter, yes?). It has annoyed me just as much when someone posts to the Celestia forum "Hey, fantastic new planet texture!" only to find that it's a virtual texture that I can't co...

That's strange... I've been making and using 8k cloudmaps for ages, even with Celestia 1.2.5 - the only requirement for them to work (AFAIK) was that they be DDS with an alpha component. If I'd known that people were having trouble with them, I'd have said something... *shrug*

Cheers,
Paul

When I read this topic, I thought it'll lead to an incredible cool new wormhole addon. Sight :( Yeah, me too. I hate it when people are too lazy to make their subject title sound like a question instead of an announcement. Or maybe they intentionally trick more people into reading the post... Cheer...

32meg is not enough memory for displaying an ordinary 32k texture. Is the Earth texture a virtual texture? That is, are you using a version of Celestia more recent than 1.2.5 ?

Cheers,
Paul

Nice links, thanks for sharing!

Cheers,
Paul

OK, I'm confused for real now. What I don't understand is how every new source can be wrong or right on this! A few months ago, Hubble shots from the space telescope showed a Mars that was much redder than this. The photos are posted on the forum somewhere. That too claimed that the shot was "true ...

Derje wrote:I am wondering why the stars don't twinkle yet. I would think that would be the first thing they'd implement.

Did you know that stars don't twinkle when in space? It's an atmospheric effect.

Cheers,
Paul

Hi praesepe,

Have you made this 16k Moon texture into a level 9 Moon texture for the new version of Orbiter? If not, then is it OK for me to do it?

Cheers,
Paul

Praesepe, I agree with Don. The lighting gradient of the overal planetary surface seems to disagree with the lighting on the features.

Also, is the graininess a property of the texture, or of the screenshot images?

Cheers,
Paul