Selecting the names of specific stars to appear in a view

[Liar]

Hi all,

I have been trying to use Celestia to make a map of small groups of nearby stars.

The problem is, at the moment i am restricted to making a screen capture and then clicking on each dot in turn to figure out which star it is. Which can be frustrating, especially since most of the dots are faraway background stars that i'm not interested in (i try to use the parralax effect to tell which stars are nearby and which are far off, but it gets a bit tiresome right-clicking and rotating the view for each speck of light.)

So, i was hoping someone here could help to do two things:

1. Select specific stars to have their names appear in Celestia. At the moment, only a few important stars show up labelled when i turn on star labels. Is there a way i can make the spefici nearby stars that i'm interested in have their labels show up?

2. Set things so that only stars within a certain radius of the target object actually show up. This would make things muuucccchhhhh easier. (I have considered making a copy of the stars file that has all but the stars i'm interested in erased from it, but... there are thousands upon millions to look through...)

Any suggestions/tips?

[selden]

Liar,

Unfortunately, Celestia does not (yet?) have the functionality you want. The Windows version does include the menu Navigation/Star Browser which will list the stars that are within a particular distance, but that doesn't help a lot.

However, the Mostly Harmless variant of Celestia seems to have features similar to what you're looking for. Its author seems to have dropped off the face of the network, though, so you're on your own in figuring out how to use it. It's based on an older version of Celestia and doesn't have Celestia's newer features.

See http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/index.htm

[Chuft-Captain]

Render -> View options has a "Filter Stars" slider, but I believe this filters out stars above a certain distance from the observers position, rather than the target star (not quite what you want I suspect)

There is a LabelledStars section in celestia.cfg which could be edited to label the stars you are interested in. Add them to the list, and they will then be labelled after re-starting Celestia with Star Labelling ON.

#------------------------------------------------------------------------
# The LabelledStars section defines which stars will have text labels
# assigned to them, which are visible when this option is turned on.
#------------------------------------------------------------------------

BTW. You can also draw lines between stars of your own choosing by editing Celestia/data/asterisms.dat (This is how constellations are drawn in Celestia.

[Liar]

Thanks to both of you for the advice;

ChuftCaptain; the LabelledStars edit sounds like the closest match to what i'd like to do.

I'll have a look at that. Might also play with the Filter Stars slider - i didn't realise it could filter by distance - i thought it was apparent magnitude, but then i never really played with it.

[Liar]

I encountered a strange quirk while editing LabelledStars, so i thought i would record it here for others to see.

When you're dealing with a multiple-star system (e.g. Rigel Kentaurus), apparently if you label the barycentre, the star label will not show up.

I think the reason for this is that Celestia only puts labels on stars which are visible, it doesn't just throw a label onto the star's rough position in space. Barycentres are never visible from very far away, so multiple-star systems won't show up. And i had been wondering why neither Procyon nor Sirius were labelled by default, while a star like Debhe was!

The obvious solution is to pick the brightest star in the system and have that labelled. So Sirius will only show up from a distance if you label "Sirius A", Procyon "Procyon A", etc etc..