Celestia Forums

An Eclipse Finder has been added to the Mac OS X version.
You can download a precompiled version from my web site, or get it from CVS. French and Spanish localizations are included (Thanks Cham, ElChristou!).

The interface is intentionally very simple. Entering the name of any planet (e.g., Earth, Jupiter) will search for eclipses cast on the planet by the moon(s). Entering the name of a moon instead, will cause the Eclipse Finder to search for eclipses cast by the planet on the moon (lunar eclipses). The Eclipse Finder takes you to the start of an eclipse, so you might want to speed up Celestia's time rate to watch the eclipse take place.

Many thanks to you Dirkpitt, for this work. Also to ElChristou, for his translation. This work isn't enough recognized and praised, while it is extremelly important to Celestia users.

... and the cross-platform UI will eventually replace it, but in the mean time hopefully it will be of some use to Mac users.

dirkpitt wrote:... and the cross-platform UI will eventually replace it, but in the mean time hopefully it will be of some use to Mac users.

I'm really sceptic about that cross-platform thing. It will be slow or unefficient in some way. Can't be, since it wont exploit the OS platform specific features. I just don't believe it.

This is somewhat off-topic, but if we were to adopt an existing, cross-platform framework like wxWindows or Qt, it's true that certain aspects of Celestia development could be bottlenecked by bugs in the gui framework. For example, Stellarium (another space simulator) used to have issues on Macs because of bugs in the underlying SDL framework.

But having 3-4 eclipse finders, one for each platform, is.. silly. Unifying the interface is an area worth exploring I think.

Yes, Tx for the effort DW, this was a long overdue to the osX version and now we are (almost) at par with the other paltforms

Concerning the cross-platform UI, I suppose it's the way to go... but I wonder if we will have to use some predeterminate graphics element for the windows etc or if we would be able to design our own stuff...

It would also be nice to have a "Flyby Finder". You'd select a spacecraft (e.g. Voyager or Cassini) and a maximum flyby distance, and it would find all the flybys by that spacecraft of various planets and moons.

- Hank

hank wrote:It would also be nice to have a "Flyby Finder". You'd select a spacecraft (e.g. Voyager or Cassini) and a maximum flyby distance, and it would find all the flybys by that spacecraft of various planets and moons.

- Hank

Despite the idea is attractive, do the number of flyby till now deserve such Finder? (I mean perhaps another kind of tool (via Lua why not) could add a little UI with some kind of "next"/"previous" flyby buttons for the selected mission...)