Celestia Forums

Dear users of Celestia,

You could do me a favour in providing me with some information:

I would like to see the disk of the Milky Way as plane or line or the equitorial grid of the Milky Way or a line of its longitude 0°.
The point of view is from earth to the sun and the orbit of the sun (Ecliptic) is visible. I am intereseted in an intersection of the planes / lines of ecliptic and disk of the Milky Way.
Is that somehow possible?

Thanks for Your response in advance.

Astro_Fox

If you're running the Windows version, in Celestia v1.6.1 you can

Open the menu Render --> View Options...
In the Grids section at the right side of the menu,
Select both Ecliptic and Galactic


The Ecliptic and Glactic grid colors are very similar. The Galactic grid is pale yellow, while the Ecliptic grid is pale pink. You can toggle them on and off while watching Celestia's window to make sure you know which is which.

While the View Options menu is still open (so you can toggle the grids if necessary), you can select Celestia's main menu and change its viewpoint appropriately until you locate where their planes intersect. Numeric values for some of the grid lines are shown along the edge of Celestia's window.

I believe the Mac and Linux versions are similar.

Below is a screengrab showing what it looks like on my computer with Equatorial, Ecliptic and Galactic grids shown. It gets a little busy

Of course, this is what you're really interested in. Don't forget that when you draw two great circles on the sky, like the Ecliptic and the Galactic equator, they always intersect in two places. While one of the intersections currently is near the direction of the galactic center, it's not really aligned with it, and won't be for a very long time.

The rectangular box indicates where the two intersect. The oval box indicates the galactic center.

Hello Selden,

thanks for the quick response.
I still had 1.6.0.

Bye

Astro_Fox