CelestialMatters News

[DOJOMO]

Fabulous work and yes please to a download.

David.

[t00fri]

Fabulous work and yes please to a download.

David.

Thanks! Your request has been recorded...

Fridger

[t00fri]

What's celestia.Sci?

A theoretical Astro-Particle physicist's way of proceeding with celestia development beyond 1.6.1, after having been an active Celestia developer and co-author for the past 10 years.

My Celestial Matters (CM) site will be the home of celestia.Sci and any more extensive discussions about it should happen there for reasons of fairness.

After some recent decisions by Chris Laurel, it is now time for an intensive public development of celestia.Sci in a separate SVN archive that will be opened soon. I am also currently preparing a detailed blog about what new features and eye candy I have already implemented during the past 2 years and what are my plans for the near future. Until recently I still had hope that an acceptable solution could be found that would lead to a merging of this large amount of new code of mine with official Celestia, but now the final word has been spoken and celestia.Sci will take off by itself.

Celestia.Sci will exhibit many complementary features to Celestia, with a main focus on a Colorful Deep Universe and Cosmology simulation in 3D. That's why celestia.Sci also comes up with this sort of Deep Space splash:


(NGC 3226 & NGC 3227 as rendered from catalog data in celestia.Sci)

Fridger

[fungun]

Looks beaytiful
Can't wait!

Tim

[t00fri]

Looks beaytiful
Can't wait!
Tim

Keep calm fungun, this topic is dated on Jan 2007

J.T.K. you are totally misinterpreting the purpose of this CelestialMatters (CM) News thread (that we started in Jan 2007, when CM was opened!). It represents a sticky partner service thread between my Celestial Matters site and shatters.net to inform people here about possibly interesting on-going threads at CM. Examples are new releases of my Texture and Normalmap tools for "Monster textures" (F-TexTools/Nmtools), respective tutorials etc. So far there were no specific infos about the new public celestia.Sci project. If you'd glance for some minutes at the posts in that thread, you will immedially be able to confirm what I just wrote...

Fridger

[fungun]

JTK, the post I was commenting on is

Re: CelestialMatters News
by t00fri » Thu May 31, 2012 3:37 pm

[t00fri]

by t00fri » JTK, the post I was commenting on is
Thu May 31, 2012 3:37 pm

Perhaps... of course but we must ask the question : Where were the results since the beginning ?
More 5 years, it's very too long, no ?

Why don't you just browse through the links in my "CelestialMatters News" thread to learn about the high-quality textures or e.g. other interesting projects (models...) that were completed by me and other graphics experts over at CM? You can find some of my textures at the "Planetary Society", on ESA and NASA pages etc.

Or did you ever enjoy Runar Thorvaldsen's great SCIFI art at CM? Click on his slide show link on his page:
http://www.celestialmatters.org/?q=node/55 .
How about competing at this very high level?? It takes time, you know...

Or the amazing 3D models that CM people did in collaboration?

Here is another alternative: Stop criticizing, learn instead some high-end C++ / openGL 3D techniques and then contribute actively to Celestia development in your spare time, like all of us devs do! Never forget, no-one gets paid here and most devs also have to make a living... Last not least, struggling with a complex project usually renders people more modest automatically

Fridger

[t00fri]

... since march 2009
I don't see ANYTHING except 'bla-bla-bla'.

Sounds like a perfect selfish consumer attitude:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Let the others do the work, criticize if it doesn't proceed fast enough and call everything "blah blah blah" that can't be downloaded with a mouse click! Right?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Incidentally, old doesn't mean bad or uninteresting.

Our modelling output unfortunately shrunk because real life caught up with our two modelling experts and CM co-founders: Christophe Campos (aka ElChristou) and Runar Thorvaldsen (aka rthorvald). After the onset of the financial crisis their full power was required in their own professional businesses...

But between 2009 and today there are nevertheless plenty of announcements in the CM News thread and even more interesting threads in CM itself ! Given your very narrow interest window, I suppose you call all these threads "blah blah blah".

However, many other people (including planetary scientists, and space research professionals) were obviously interested in them and have actively contributed.

Here are just a few example threads from CM that all started after 2009 (have a look at the number of views and contributors.):

• Nick Risinger's MilkyWay for Celestia(.Sci) (Download) ( Start Jan 2012, 3049 views, 15 replies)
• Imagine the Solar System was part of a Globular Cluster (Start Jan 2012, 961 views, 7 replies)
• My favorite Moon texture: Chang'e 2 remapped, colored, ..16k (Start Mar 2012, 2197 views, 21 replies)
• Working on the new Chinese Chang'e 2 Moon Texture (Start Feb 2012, 3399 views, 21 replies)
• In-depth documentation of Celestia 1.6.1 source code (Start Oct 2011, 1321 views)
• New (Nov 30, 2010) Tethys map & 16k VT set for Download (Start Dec 2010, 10556 views, 25 replies)
• "Singing" Pulsars in Globular Clusters (Start Jul 2010, 3745 views, 1 reply)
• Marc Buie's New Pluto Imaging in Celestia (Start Feb 2010, 3491 views, 4 replies)
• The Moon with new LRO-LOLA Altimeter Data (Start Mar 2010, 4596 views, 5 replies)
• Topography of Saturn's icy moons (Start Dec 2010, 2860 views, 6 replies)
  
• Neutrinos traveling faster than light?? (Start Sep 2011), 7475 views, 30 replies)
• Online Radioactivity Measurements in Japan ( Start Mar 2011, 8882 views, 31 replies)
• Scientists discover giant gamma-ray bubbles in the Milky Way (Start Nov 2010, 4500 views, 8 replies)

And note, CelestialMatters is NOT conceived to target on Celestia specifically.

Fridger

[Andy74]

Even for non-professionals that are just interested in astronomy and related topics, CM is in fact an excellent source, just think about the exclusive news about what was going on at CERN related to the superfast neutrinos.
And in my opinion the list which Fridger presented in his last post shows impressively the richness of the CM website with respect to scientific content.
I'm absolutely sure that everyone who is not just eighteen and has a "normal" life with a full-time job, a family etc. will understand quite easily why people like Fridger and other Celestia or CM contributors are not able to present breaking news in development on a weekly basis. On the contrary, they deserve every respect we can offer them for all their dedicated work in the past that they shared willingly with a community that is not always grateful.
Fridger, the announcement that you will soon go public with your Celestia.Sci project is great news! Please go ahead, but take all the time you need.

I'm just noticing that my post is somewhat off-topic. I wouldn't mind if the admins delete it, but for now I'm just sharing my thoughts ...

Regards

Andy

[t00fri]

Many thanks, Andy,

for your great words of appreciation!

Cheers,
Fridger

[t00fri]

Tomorrow morning, July 4th, (7:0 UTC <=> 9:0 CEST) CERN will give an update on the Higgs search as curtain raiser to the ICHEP conference (the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia from 4-11 July, 2012).. The rumors seem to point to an imminent anouncement of the Higgs discovery tomorrow. But even in case it's not going to be a formal announcement of discovery, the probablity is high that the long sought Higgs particle has been essentially located.

http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewt ... 19&start=3

More in Celestial Matters by tomorrow! Stay tuned...

Fridger

[selden]

Apparently CERN made some pre-recorded videos about it, and one was accidentally posted on their Web site for a while. (It's not there now.)

See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/larg ... ticle.html

[symaski62]

Apparently CERN made some pre-recorded videos about it, and one was accidentally posted on their Web site for a while. (It's not there now.)

See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/larg ... ticle.html

125.3 GeV signal "higgs" (7 TeV , 8 TeV)

[MiR]

Tomorrow morning, July 4th, (7:0 UTC <=> 9:0 CEST) CERN will give an update on the Higgs search as curtain raiser to the ICHEP conference (the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia from 4-11 July, 2012).. The rumors seem to point to an imminent anouncement of the Higgs discovery tomorrow. But even in case it's not going to be a formal announcement of discovery, the probablity is high that the long sought Higgs particle has been essentially located.

http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewt ... 19&start=3

More in Celestial Matters by tomorrow! Stay tuned...

Fridger

I've just found time to follow this theme at your celestialmatters site (knowing it's a little bit late)...

So let me say "Thanks" for this information. It's a little big sensation...

On the other hand... for me (as a non-professional) it would be a much greater excitement if the good people at Cern would find out (and proof it) that there is no "Higgs" particle there...

Because that would mean that we (and the world around us) is just an illusion
Like the great French philosopher (Teilhard de Chardin) wrote: "Our world dissolves in the infinitely large (macrocosm) and the infinitely small (microcosm)..."

Anyway; I'm sure this is not the last answer, but a door to many more questions...

Michael

[t00fri]

A 84-million star color-magnitude diagram of the Milky Way

http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=445

People with a deeper interest in the interpretation of the recent gigantic color-magnitude relation of galactic bulge stars are most welcome to participate in the discussion over at CM. We discuss the various important findings of the original VVV paper.

Fridger

[t00fri]

Discussion on celestia.Sci's User Interface

http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=443

New UI features and toolbar icons implemented...
Comments are always welcome!

Fridger

[Fenerit]

Is CM down abruptly?

[t00fri]

Is CM down abruptly?

No idea what is going on at Ibiblio.org!?? I am going to wait for another day and then I'll write them a mail to inquire. So far I did receive NOTHING. In the past down times at CelestialMatters aka Ibiblio.org were pleasingly rare... The Motherlode that is also hosted by Ibiblio.org seems to be up. Yet, meanwhile, they use quite a number of different servers. Once I had a DNS problem.

Sorry,
Fridger

[t00fri]

CelestialMatters is again up!

Fridger

[t00fri]

CelesltialMatters (and the Motherlode) is up again!

Fridger