Celestia Forums

FYI: Cha HA 8 A (stars_binary.stc) has Period 0, SemiMajorAxis 0 - this causes it to be rejected in 1.7.0

You are welcome to write the code for that. Remember that some languages put the constellation name before the Greek letter!

I doubt this change was done deliberately to break your scripts. Sure, it needs to be fixed for English at some point. What should such a script do if the user's language is set to Spanish, where the first letter of the Greek alphabet is spelled "Alfa"?

Looks like a side-effect of updating the code for parsing user input to Bayer designations to support component identifiers. In 1.6.x, "Alpha Centauri B" will fail to match "ALF Cen B" but in 1.7.0 it works. Unfortunately the way this was achieved is by treating the final space a...

Actually it turns out there is a property in .dsc files that does this already, called Position. Since I don't want to introduce yet another incompatiblity between how .stc and .dsc files work, I'll use that.

The problem: it is not possible to guarantee an entry in an .stc file will result in the same coordinates as an entry in the stars.dat file. The reason: .stc files provide a spherical polar coordinate system in the equatorial frame, while stars.dat and Celestia's internal code use rectangular coordi...

Here's a Python script to dump the database to CSV Usage: python3 dump_starsdat.py /path/to/stars.dat /path/to/output.csv If you don't supply an output file, it writes to stdout instead. Columns: ⋅ id - numeric ID ⋅ catName - the numeric ID translated into a HIP or TYC number &sd...

Ah that probably explains why the orientation is so weird, averaging Euler angles (which is what the orbital elements actually are) doesn't really give anything useful. And the average of elements leads to certain ambiguities: e.g. to reproduce GJ 676, I see I need to compute Ω as the average of 48....

There are scripts (UpdateContent.ps1 and updatecontent.sh - pick whichever is more convenient on your OS) in the support subfolder that will download the latest version of the CelestiaContent repository into the content subdirectory.

Nice update. One improvement that might be worth doing is setting the inclination of additional planets in systems with astrometric orbits. So calling the classes of objects: ⋅ Astrometric planets = known i , known Ω ⋅ Transiting planets = known i , unknown Ω ⋅ RV plane...

a major rewrite of the stellar octree is needed for something like this to occur. otherwise, celestia cant handle massive star databases at all. something like the defunct AstroDB project that was worked on a while back It would also end up breaking at least some scripts. Interfaces like celestia::...

What's the criterion for putting companions into extrasolar.stc vs extrasolar.ssc? E.g. HD 28185 c (~20 Jupiter masses) is in extrasolar.stc as an L2 dwarf (which seems rather too warm, at least eyeballing the evolution curve for a 20 Jupiter mass object in https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0103383, it...

New pre-release. Main fix is in the code used to select Gaia-based or HIP-based distances in the EDR3-based databases. This wasn't fully updated from when it was only operating on the Hipparcos subset of the data, a notable symptom of this is a "bubble" of stars at ~913 light years. This s...

New alpha build, with an updated scoring function for the cross-match which incorporates parallaxes and fixes an issue where the highest weight was effectively given to the parameter (e.g. proper motion, magnitude difference) with the worst matches. Checking the distances of a few of the stars with ...

Looking at render.cpp, the constellation label is positioned at the average position of the first chain of the constellation diagram. For the default file in 1.6.x, this would be the chain consisting of "Gamma Hya", "Beta Hya" and "Xi Hya". Maybe there's a problem with ...

SevenSpheres wrote:although part of the constellation lines do cross over into Crater for some reason

As far as I'm aware, the Celestia asterisms are based on the IAU/Sky&Telescope ones. Their diagram for Hydra draws the constellation line through Alpha and Beta Crateris.

Tried this in the address field in Chrome: http://www.google.com:celestia.space "draw lines" Don't know why you'd try that, I said "site:celestia.space", which is used in the query the link points to. Here's what your query should be: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aceles...

Based on experiences with several boards' search implementations, I generally find the most reliable option to be to use an external search engine, starting the query with "site:<URL>", e.g. site:celestia.space "exact phrases of words" Quick test, this seems to be somewhat more r...

Made a release version based on Gaia EDR3, managed to do it before the full DR3 comes out. :) Details in the first post in the thread. There are still additional improvements that could be made, e.g. trying to remove the Magellanic spikes, but I'm leaving these as "for future consideration"...

Created v0.1.0 release version, the only change is it now uses .NET 6.0 (LTS).
https://github.com/ajtribick/cmodconvert/releases/tag/v0.1.0