Couple of feature requests

[Guest]

Hi Chris and all,

After playing around with this awesome program I managed to squeeze a couple of suggestions out of my dusty skull, please let me know what you think:

* Desktop background mode?

Ok I guess the best way to give an example of this is by using the same mode with the visualisation features of the latest Winamp releases. What it does is set the background color of the desktop to the 'overlay' colour, and then 'superimposes' the visualisation onto the desktop background. Probably a better example (i.e. one that puts 3D content onto the desktop background) are the WildTangent dancer visualisations for WinAmp. These use HTML files that you can set as your background in Windows.

I thought it'd be really cool to setup Celestia like this, i.e. you set up the object you want to monitor in the program, say, put it in sync orbit around Earth, set it as your desktop background, put Celestia in the "tray" or something, so that you can have a "real-time" XPlanet style Earth on your desktop. Now *that* would be cool.

* Longitude/latitude markers

Please correct me if I'm wrong - does Celestia have this ability already? i.e. specifying somehow that the city of Sydney is at -33.53 151.13, and having a little Sydney label stuck to that point on the Earth model.

* Celestial object search

By keyword or number? Or is this basically what Select Target does already?

Hope I'm not asking for too much... keep up the good work on such a fantastic program.

{R}

[{RainmakeR}]

Dammit, I forgot to log in. ;)

[{RainmakeR}]

Oh, and another slightly frivalous but incredibly awesome thing would be:

* Lens flare from stars and such.

Imagine watching the sun dawn over the Earth's horizon, and seeing that blinding flash and lens flare.... mmmmm... :)

[chris]

Oh, and another slightly frivalous but incredibly awesome thing would be:

* Lens flare from stars and such.

Imagine watching the sun dawn over the Earth's horizon, and seeing that blinding flash and lens flare.... mmmmm...

I won't add lens flares to Celestia--I think that the effect is overused, and it also doesn't represent what you see with your eye. However, I will be working on a much improved glare effect that will give a better impression of extreme brightness.

--Chris

[chris]

Desktop background mode:
I need to look into this some more . . . it will be a while before I get around to working on this. A screen saver version of Celestia could be ready a lot sooner however.

Longitude/latitude markers:
Definitely an item high on my to do list . . . labels for surface locations should be ready for the next version of Celestia.

Object search:
It's already there . . . Select Object and Goto Object find planets, galaxies, and stars based on names.

--Chris

[Matt McIrvin]

Star colors are currently pretty realistic-- which means that if the star is not very bright, they're hardly visible. It might be nice to have a color-exaggeration mode that would better distinguish the spectral types.

(I find that in real life I can't see star colors all that well without binoculars. I think that women are better at seeing them than men. At least, this is what I have concluded by the highly scientific method of asking four or five people.)

Other ideas in an astronomical vein:

Visibility switches for different types of objects, so you could, say, look only at planets and their moons, only at asteroids, only at deep-sky objects, etc.

RA and declination displays for selected objects.

[Matt McIrvin]

Many astronomical objects-- for example, stars (judging from the sun, at least), and some cloud-covered bodies such as Venus and Titan-- look more interesting in wavelengths other than visible light.

Objects could have a variety of skins for different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. The bands available could be specific to an object, if you don't want this project to get completely out of hand...

[{RainmakeR}]

I won't add lens flares to Celestia--I think that the effect is overused, and it also doesn't represent what you see with your eye. However, I will be working on a much improved glare effect that will give a better impression of extreme brightness.

Awww, pretty please? Hehe, doesn't matter, I just thought it would look pretty... I guess you're right, the effect is used a lot these days. Looking forward to the nav markers, and the screensaver mode would be cool (but the desktop mode would be cooler ). Keep up the excellent work.

[Aya Reiko]

my two cents

The ablilty to set the FOV to a specific value.

Shift-, and Shift-. halves/doubles the FOV while , and . decreases/increases by a small amount (say 1 - 5 degrees?).

Shift-(up/down/left/right) rotates the view by the current FOV level or 90 deg.s. in the chosen direction.

Macros (aka Flight Plans like the Demo).

Is it normal for the Earth to be that small when viewed from the moon?

Is there any alternate means to load textures? I'm using a hi-res texture of Mars from the OpenUniverse site, Celestia stalls for about a second when it loads the texture. The effect is that you stop a couple hundread thousand miles from Mars for a second, and then suddenly you're there.

[Matt McIrvin]

The full Moon seen from Earth looks about half a degree wide. (Coincidentally, the Sun is too; that's what makes solar eclipses so cool).

Since Earth is about four times as wide as the Moon, and the distance is the same in either direction (give or take a tiny bit because an observer stands on the surface of a world rather than at the center), the size of Earth seen from the Moon should be about two degrees. It looks right to me.

An interesting thing to do is to stand on or near the Moon in Moon sync orbit (thus simulating standing on the surface as it rotates), and look toward Earth *without* tracking it. Then speed up time and run through a month.

Earth doesn't stay absolutely motionless, as you might expect from the Moon's synchronous rotation, but bobs around in the sky. This is because of the libration of the Moon-- the slight mismatch between orbit and rotation that results from differing inclinations and varying orbital speed. It's more apparent motion than you might expect.

[chris]

my two cents

The ablilty to set the FOV to a specific value.

Shift-, and Shift-. halves/doubles the FOV while , and . decreases/increases by a small amount (say 1 - 5 degrees?).

Shift-(up/down/left/right) rotates the view by the current FOV level or 90 deg.s. in the chosen direction.

Macros (aka Flight Plans like the Demo).

Is it normal for the Earth to be that small when viewed from the moon?

Is there any alternate means to load textures? I'm using a hi-res texture of Mars from the OpenUniverse site, Celestia stalls for about a second when it loads the texture. The effect is that you stop a couple hundread thousand miles from Mars for a second, and then suddenly you're there.

The Earth is indeed the correct size when viewed from the Moon . . .

I like your suggestions a lot. Celestia needs some better controls for the field of view--the current ones are rather awkward.

As for texture loading, I'll be adding a multi-threaded texture loader to Celestia which should eliminate the jumping. Even with this enhancement, Celestia will still slow down while loading the texture, so I'm also going to make it possible to specify certain textures to preload.

--Chris