Celestia Forums

No, Calypso (and the other trojan moons) has a tadpole orbit, which is the similar to a horseshoe orbit, except Calypso just librates around the L5 point, rather than bouncing between L4 and L5 like Epimetheus. That means that sometimes Calypso is further away or closer to Tethys or Saturn.

No that is Calypso. Celestia has it wrong as Calypso definitely doesn't have a simple Keplerian orbit. At some point I need to create a youtube video showing that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_ ... pole_orbit

Not sure what the UFO thing is about (can't read italian), but the moons seem to be identified correctly. Some of the position differences are due to your version of Celestia using Keplerian elements for Saturn's small moons, which isn't quite correct due to the effects of nearby, larger moons. The ...

hmm, wouldn't this give you the radius of the star, not the diameter?

I have encountered this issue when making movies of spacecraft fly bys. In my movie of Jupiter Europa Orbiter flybys of Io:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRpSgmgfCes

You can see little stutter rotations of Io, which is me trying counter act the flips.

hmm, you are right danielj, I thought I had extended it to 16k, but it is actually 8k (8192x4096)... Well, you aren't actually missing much. Maybe a bit on the southern, sub-Jupiter hemisphere. The original image is 11445x5723.

Would there be a way to script it so that at some times it is random, other times there are set plumes at locations? We have seen plumes at 24 volcanoes. As I said in my previous post, some are persistent, meaning that every time we have looked for it, the plume was there. Prometheus, Kanehekili, Ma...

Actually, the USGS basemap is 16k IIRC, expanded from 11445x5723 [ http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/JupiterSatellites/io.html ]. I used a virtual texture for Io in this case. As far as the volcanoes go, keep in mind that only about ~24 plumes have ever been observed on Io, with 6-8 observed at ...

The map uses the USGS basemap and basically "paints" dark paterae floor terrain or volcanoes that have been seen as hotspots. For volcanoes where we have high resolution thermal data, like the Amirani data you linked to, I painted only those areas where thermal emission was seen. I'll be h...

As I mentioned in a thread over on the Add-on releases sub-forum , I created a video showing the four Io flybys currently in the baseline trajectory for the Jupiter Europa Orbiter , NASA's mission to orbit Europa in the 2020s. I have created a small add-on with this trajectory. Please note a few thi...

Yesterday, I posted a video showing the four Jupiter Europa Orbiter encounters with Jupiter's moon Io on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRpSgmgfCes The video included my USGS basemap texture plus a nightside texture that has glowing hotspots from active volcanoes. I've put these together in...

No, I don't work at CICLOPS, which is the team leader's Carolyn Porco's little shop; I work for one of the other Imaging Team members. However, one of my tasks is writing up the Looking Ahead articles for each orbit and working on the graphics, which are generally created in Celestia with some mild ...

Yep, they sure are We post previews of ISS (and occasionally other instruments) observations for each Cassini orbit. Celestia is used simply because it is the easiest for me to update (in terms of spice kernels and textures) and the graphics are a lot better.

But this texture is TOO OLD,more than 1 year of age.I understand that astronomers completed Ganymede map recently... The map that was completed would not be a new texture but is a geologic map based on a USGS basemap created several years ago. I guess you could create an alternative texture from it...

This is the Celestia definition I use for this recently announced satellite of Saturn, S/ 2009 S 1 that seems to work reasonably well given the available observation of it: "2009 S1" "Sol/Saturn" { Class "minormoon" Texture "asteroid.jpg" Radius 0.15 Elliptica...

One change that Chris and I have discussed and that I would like to see included in particle systems, is some sort of user-definable phase function. Currently by default, Celestia assumes that objects are either emitters of light (like stars) or if they reflect light, they are back-scattering, meani...

hmm, not really, it improved the features on the trailing hemisphere a bit, but it threw everything else off. I think the features seen in the texture in your top image needs to be rotated to the left (to the west) by 10-20 degrees to fit perfectly with the Cassini perspective.

Hmm, you're right, that is a bit too stretched... I think something halfway between the old model and this new one in terms of stretching the sub-Saturn to anti-Saturn axis, and I think you got it. Now we just need Pan and Atlas :-) Given the available data, those shouldn't be as hard, nor are their...

Great job! A few comments 1) rotation seems alright, the features shown in your first image could be rotated by about 10 degrees to the west (left) to match the Cassini view. 2) If it helps, the semi-major axes the imaging team measured were a=19.4 km (38.8 km from sub-Saturn to anti-Saturn points),...

Great to see an unlit-side rings texture coming around!