Searching for stars

[starman_1948]

When I press enter and type in HIP only a list of 6 stars appear I thought that many more starting with HIP would appear in the list. If I go to the Navigation menu and click on select object I can then type in numerous more HIP numbers and goto that star in question although there are still some I cannot find. If someone could throw some light on this I would be greatful. Thanks .

[Hungry4info]

Not every star appears in the list, just the ones whose names are defined inside quotation marks in the .stc file (if I'm not mistaken).

You can type e.g. HIP 55536 and Celetia will find it (assuming the star is real), even if it does not show up in the list or in the star browser.

[enter] HIP 55536 [enter] (HIP 55536 will now be selected).

[starman_1948]

Thank you for your reply, yes that does work, but there are still a couple of stars I cannot go to, I downloaded an addon the Asgard Warship and the read me file says go to HIP 29524 which I still cannot do so I asume that star is not in the catalogue. Is it possible to add stars, I read somewhere that the addon star catalogues are not very accurate and it is best to just use the one that comes with Celestia 1.6.0.

[selden]

The Hipparcos astrometric satellite got very unreliable distances for a few of the stars that it tried to measure. They've been left out of Celestia's database.

You can add any stars you want by creating an STC catalog and putting it in Celestia's "extras" directory. It's just a plain text file, so you can use your favorite text editor to create it.

The STC catalog format is described in the Celestia WikiBook at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia/STC_File

[starman_1948]

Thanks for your reply, adding a star looks a bit more than I can manage at this stage (I have only been using the program for a few weeks) so for now I have changed the SCC file in the addon, I replaced HIP 29524 with HIP 101693 so now I can go to HIP 101693 and find the planet and the Asgard Warship there. Thanks to every one for taking the time to help me.

[selden]

Changing which star is involved certainly is the most straight forward way to fix your problem!
It's not as if it matters very much exactly which star it's orbiting. I think SG-1 carefully avoided being specific about which stars were involved.

For the future, though, you might consider looking at
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... intro.html
It explains in detail how Addons are supposed to work and how to create simple STC and SSC files.

[starman_1948]

Will do thanks very much.