How do you use Celestia to educate people?

[Fenerit]

It looks very good. Just a question: what do you mean with "Earth don't accept this procedure"? All that which works for Mars should work for the Earth.

[Juliux]

Celestia has 3 textures for Earth: clouds, night-lights and other named "earth.png". This image is like a .GIF: it has areas of transparent color in same place of continents: only seas are opaque. I dont know what provide terrain information. Mars has only one texture.

[Andy74]

Celestia has 3 textures for Earth: clouds, night-lights and other named "earth.png". This image is like a .GIF: it has areas of transparent color in same place of continents: only seas are opaque. I dont know what provide terrain information. Mars has only one texture.

Juliux,

for your purposes, you can simply drop both the cloud map and the night map. The earth.png has an alpha channel for the spec map as you found out. But that is not necessary. You can use PNG files without an alpha channel and also JPG and DDS files. If your map is a JPG file, just replace earth.png with it.

Andy

[Juliux]

Thanks, Andy. I will try it. I will put the new earth.jpg and dont will leave cloud map. I wish see the clouds over the map!

[ANDREA]

A tiny thing: other utilities of Celestia:
For long time I sought over Internet any "virtual globe map", geographical and political, unsuccessfully (Google Earth dont serve for this). Then, I fell in an idea: to change the Celestia textures. So, I scanned a world map and apply it as Mars texture. (Earth dont accept this procedure). Of course, it run well. But, there are two problems:1) my world map has Mercator projection, and Celestia need Cylindrical projection. 2)Is desirable a more detailed map.

Julius, your map is very nice. Will you share it, please?
Bye

Andrea

[Juliux]

Yes, of course!. But, wait twice days, and I will put a link to map.

[Juliux]

Andrea:
Newly: warning, I know a very little english.
Im fast today!
I send you the map in jpg format because png format is four times greater (using Photoshop). You can follow the counsels wrote in forum. Earth.jpg dont work directly in Celestia 1.2. I must convert it to png format for see it (earth.png, but before backup original earth.png). The clouds fly (translucently) over the map! Too, you can rename earth.jpg as mars.jpg or other and "travel" to those planets for view.

PD: remember incorrect earthmap projection (Mercator).
PD 2: I put a link to .zip archive for avoid viewing the image in the forum (3,7 Megas). Download and unzip.
I hope you like it.

Other: Any know URL to full resolution images from Cassini-Huygens probe?. The National Geographics pictures are marvellous but very small... and scanty.
http://www.sandra-rodriguez.com.ar/usoexterno/earth.zip

[Fenerit]

Celestia has 3 textures for Earth: clouds, night-lights and other named "earth.png". This image is like a .GIF: it has areas of transparent color in same place of continents: only seas are opaque. I dont know what provide terrain information. Mars has only one texture.

Juliux,

for your purposes, you can simply drop both the cloud map and the night map. The earth.png has an alpha channel for the spec map as you found out. But that is not necessary. You can use PNG files without an alpha channel and also JPG and DDS files. If your map is a JPG file, just replace earth.png with it.

Andy

Try this method. Let make an "political" .ssc file in ..\data\.. or ..\extras\.. folder and add these strings:

AltSurface "Political Earth" "Sol/Earth"

{
Texture "your_original_earthtexture_here.png"
OverlayTexture "your_political_texture_here.png"
}

Then right click on Earth and choose it.

[Fenerit]

Sorry, aborted method. your map it's not cylindrical projection

[Fenerit]

One moment: What is in Mercator projection if you overlays the continents? At least remove the first string and hold the second one. Although, with the .jpg you lost the transparency.

[Juliux]

Hi, Fenerit. I dont understand you problem. I could to use earth.jpg with celestia. First, I convert it to .png with Photoshop and voila!

[Fenerit]

Oh, yes. My topic was a little confusionary. Intend: when you say "...it has areas of transparent color in same place of continents", I mean how a .jpg image does fill these area with the white color once saved in a photoretouch program; this has made me perplex. Nevertheless, the altsurface method may work with your political map's image as it is.

[kramskov]

Animations of the Earth-Sun system

This post has nothing to do with the discussion above, but it fall under the title of the thread and that is why I put it here.

I have taught in the Danish secondary school for a decade and the basic, mandatory physics course includes a topic of basic astronomy.
Many of the students do not know about the most basic stuff and what many find very difficult is to grasp the movement in space and how for example the Earth's orbit and rotation can explain day length and seasons.

I think one of the great thing about Celestia is the possibility to "configure" the universe as you like, for example to change scale to emphasize a point.
I have used Celestia to make 3 animations as CEL scripts to illustrate the most basic things about the Earth-Sun system.

1. Latitudes and longitudes.

2. Day and night.

3. Seasons.

I have used the animations for demonstration in the classroom, but the pupils also got access to them, so they could run the animations for themselves.
Because of that the animations were made in Danish. I have translated most of it to English and you are welcome to use them directly or as inspiration to make you own version (it is easy to edit the scripts to your own language).

You will find them at the bottom of this page: http://ramskovsressourcer.dk/undervisning/fysik/astronomi/celestia.php. The page is in Danish, but use the link to the English versions (there is one for Windows as well as Linux). You get a zip file, which includes an installation guide.

Kurt