Quaoar

[fred]

Hi,

Am I supposed to have Quaoar in Celestia? I can't find it in the solar system.

I have Celestia 1.3.1 prerelease 6.

If I go to the menu, and select "Select Object" and type "Quaoar", it doesn't select anything.

[granthutchison]

You need to download
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/files/kuiperbelt.ssc
and place it in your extras folder.
Because pluto.jpg doesn't exist in 1.3.1pre6, you'll find Quaoar (which uses that texture) ends up looking like white sphere - but if you like, you can edit the ssc to change the assigned texture to asteroid.jpg.

Grant

[fred]

Thanks ! I guess it will be in the next official release of Celestia.

A big white ball. I like it.

[Gordon]

you can also use Rassilon add-on that you'll find at http://ennui.celestiaproject.net/~rassilon/

bye

G.

[Darkmiss]

Thanks ! I guess it will be in the next official release of Celestia.

I wouldn't count on it being added to the next release
as there has been sevral new Celestia update releases, since the discovery of Quaoar.
and it has never been added officially.

just add this code to your extras folder, and use any texture you wish
(as no one knows what it looks like anyway)

Code: Select all

"Quaoar" "Sol"
{
   Texture "asteroid.jpg"
   Radius   625
   InfoURL "http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~chad/quaoar/"

   CustomOrbit "quaoar"
   EllipticalOrbit {
      Period          283.782
      SemiMajorAxis    43.184
      Eccentricity      0.036
      Inclination       8.0
      AscendingNode   188.9
      ArgOfPericenter 162.9
      MeanAnomaly     263.3
      Epoch       2452601.0
   }

   RotationPeriod     48.0
   Obliquity           7.9
   Albedo              0.07
}

I use an edited Triton texture, made darker.

[fred]

I don't understand, why should Quaoar not be part of Celestia?

[selden]

Fred,

Turn your question around.
Why should Quaoar be included in the base version of Celestia?

Think of the base version as something to whet your appetite. It includes a random selection from the various types of solar-system objects.

Extensive catalogs are available for use with Celestia which list most of the known objects. For example, at least two catalogs of Trans-Neptunian objects are readily available. Quaoar is one of the TNOs that they include.

Click on the (www) link below for one starting point for locating these catalogs.

[fred]

ok, so I guess I didn't understand what Celestia is trying to be. I didn't know that people were only putting "random selection from the various types of solar-system objects". I thought we were looking to have the most possible objects in the program to look for the most accurate simulation of the universe that is possible.

I don't think I have time now to add things myself to Celestia, but I will look at the link.

thanks

[granthutchison]

Fred:
If you put all the many thousands of known solar system bodies into Celestia, it would never be able to simulate them all (somewhere out there, you can find a monster asteroid file that'll kill your Celestia frame rate stone dead). The best that can be done is to provide a variety of different add-on classes of objects to meet people's various interests at various times.
The good news is that there are a lot of files available you can download and use, without ever having to generate your own.

Grant

[fred]

Of course, it is not possible to have everything. Like I said in my previous post, I thought Celestia was looking to have the most accurate simulation of the universe POSSIBLE. It is not possible to have everything. I saw that there are planets around other stars in Celestia... I think those planets are less important than Quaoar. A lot of the asteroids are less important than Quaoar, yet they are there.

I guess these things are a matter of opinion, on what should and should not be there. I'll keep Quaoar in my version of Celestia and others can do the same or not. But how do we decide if an object should be in Celestia or not? Someone else will make that decision, but in my opinion Quaoar is an important enough object to be present in Celestia, more so than most asteroids, and some Jupiter and Saturn moons.

[selden]

Fred,

That's one of the things about Celestia that I really like: you can organize the universe the way you want it to be!

[Paul]

Of course, it is not possible to have everything.

It's even worse than that - it's difficult to represent a lot of things, because we don't know enough about them! The best example is the perennial argument about blank vs. made-up detail for planet surfaces we haven't fully mapped.

Cheers,
Paul