Celestia Forums

The following image from the Mars Rov[img]er web site helps put the location of things in perspective: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20040209a/02_overview_labels-B016R1_br.jpg This image was produced (nearly a year ago!) after Opportunity landed, but before it started movi...

Frank: The new NVIDIA FX 6600 looks interesting, too. Although it is a chopped-down version of a higher-performance card, its performance in many ways exceeds the top-of-the-line of the previous generation. There is a review at http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q3/geforce-6600gt/index.x?pg=1

Harald: My FireFox version is more recent than April. I followed your link to the bug report, and I cannot tell how the versions that they report as fixed correspond to FireFox version numbers. At any rate, I only have about 100 cookies, total. I allow very few web sites to store cookies. Following ...

Hi Selden No, I am not using any such utilities. I currently have two cookies that appear to come from shatters.net. They are both named phpbb2mysql_data. When I view details on both of those cookies, one of them is from the domain ".shatters.net" (note the leading dot), and expires tomorrow morning...

Hello: A month or so ago, I switched from Internet Explorer to Moizilla Firefox version 0.9.2. I am a daily browser of the shatters.net forums. Over a period of a year or more, I never observed the following problem under Internet Explorer. While using Firefox, every once in a while, I browse the sh...

Hey! This thread doesn't belong in purgatory. If the forum admin is contributing to the thread, then it belongs in the Physics and Astronomy forum. I was not aware until just now that we can intentionally create posts in the purgatory forum. I thought it was just an administrative option. I don't wa...

But it would only take a little bit of wind to dump a pile of dust on the solar panels. I have to say, given that the lifespan of the rover is determined by how much time it takes for dust to collect on the solar panels, I'm surprised they didn't include a mechanism to clear it of dust. It seems lik...

Walton: I generated a normal map using .001 as the bump height argument when invoking nm16. (I'm getting good at running the script -- I just kicked it off and three hours later it was done.) The result is absolutely no visible shading, even under the most extreme sunset conditions. I don't suppose ...

Walton: I understand what the normal maps do now. When I look at the north-south-running mountain ranges in Celestia on the June 21 equinox (so that shadows are directly east-west), sure enough, you are right that the mountains are only truly shadowless in a brief 15-minute window around noon. For t...

Several people asked about Barringer Crater, a.k.a. Meteor Crater. It is not southeast of the location I showed in the first post, but northwest, at latitude 35.2, longitude -111.1, east of Flagstaff and west of Winslow. It is only visible as a one or two black dots in my 64K normal map, and does no...

Hello: Is it impolite of me to ask how shatters.net is paid for? What amount of voluntary monetary contribution would it take on a monthly basis to host the forum on a different internet connection? Does the forum itself use much network bandwidth? Is the shatters.net server ever bogged down, or is ...

Tim, Celestia only darkens areas that have surface normals that point away from the light source. Celestia does not implement "self shading." As a result, it doesn't show shadows extending across the landscape as they should. Maybe someday... I wondered about that, since it never did seem like the ...

Tim What ratio (3x?) are you using for your bumpheight? Walton Walton: I am not sure what ratio I actually accomplished, because I don't really know the math behind what nm16 does with the bump height parameter that I give it. I specified a value of 100 for the bump height when invoking the nm16 to...

What is your system specs? Because if this texture are not VT,only very advanced computers can deal with it,not only to create but also to show itself. Actually I think this texture will only work in a Pentium 4 3.0,1GB or more of RAM,Geforce FX 5800 or 5900,HD 160 gb Anyway,a system that I can?t a...

It wasn't the registry settings. I found them, and reset them (after saving them away), but Celestia still died.

So then I re-installed Celestia, and Celestia worked. I restored my original registry settings, and Celestia still worked.

Tim Crews

Sometimes I can be stupid.

I have the "show local time" option set in Celestia. So in the Himalayas, it is showing a morning time (that is, morning in Arizona), but of course the Himalayas are on the other side of the world. It is evening in India when it is morning here, and vice-versa.

Tim

Evil: Do you see that the arc extends all the way around, so that maybe only 11:00 to 2:00 is obscured? In fact, I can almost imagine another concentric circle around the first circle, with perhaps double the diameter of the original circle. I just looked at the Earth Impact Database, and it isn't l...

Hello: I know this forum is called "Physics and Astronomy", but now that I am using very high-resolution Earth textures, I'm starting to notice various geological things that would be fun to discuss. May I presume to ask a Geology question? I live in the Phoenix, Arizona area. To the northeast of Ph...

I'm having second thoughts about normal map inversion. In the Washington and Phoenix pictures, mountains seem to be illuminated on the east side in the morning, and the west side in the evening, as expected. But in the Himalayas pictures, the opposite seems to be true. The morning picture has mounta...

Hello: Windows XP SP1, Celestia 1.3.1 . All of a sudden, now when I start Celestia the screen goes blank, flashes lots of weird horizontal lines with superimposed circles and random Windows icons, etc. CTRL-ALT-DELETE doesn't even snap out of it. I still have a mouse cursor, amazingly, but I haven't...