Celestia Forums

Hi everyone,
Just d/l Celstia last night and it's a fantastic program, my question is, I saw a Mac with something called EarthDesk on it, where it shows real time imagery of the earth and it's cloud cover, light side, dark side as a wallpaper on the desktop. I was wondering if you're able to do this with Celestia? Could i make one of the maps my desktop while it showed the real time image of the earth with it's cloud cover and so forth? or maybe of the Moons surface or whatever else?

I thinks theres a script that lets you add 'realtime' cloud cover.... you will have to search. It will still be three or four hours old though... and the quality will be lacking.

I've been using OSX planet... same as earthdesk but free!

Actually i was looking for a way to make Celestia appear as my desktop...if you go into the desktop Kontrol center there is a way to set you desktop to auto update, i was wondering if there was a way to make Celestia do that. so the image on my desktop is the realtime image of say the earth.

Unfortunately,Celestia does not have that capability.

Celestia is overkill for this, you should look at Xplanet or xglobe instead.

Christophe wrote:Celestia is overkill for this, you should look at Xplanet or xglobe instead.

oh i did originally but thought Celestia was cooler ...

selden wrote:Unfortunately,Celestia does not have that capability.

Selden,

while I see your "Unfortunately" as a typical "American style" polite answer, I must say that I'd consider it as a monstruous vaste of programming efforts if we had provided a dumb "screensaver mode" for Celestia, given all its inherent sophistication

faa_70 wrote:oh i did originally but thought Celestia was cooler ...

Obviously this guy does not know what he is talking about ...

Bye Fridger

Fridger,

You may have forgotten that there have been previous requests for this capability. Many people would like to have a changing view of space as the backdrop and/or a "screen saver" for their computers.

(While it might be a screen saver, it would certainly be no power saver. Changing 3D graphics use a lot more power from the wall socket than most people realize.)

A previous discussion is here:
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9408&

And a 3D screensaver which shows scenes of the solar system is available at http://www.3dsolarsystem.com/

Sorry if I offened anyone with my simple question. I wasn't looking for a screen saver but an "updatable" wallpaper ala EarthDesk for Apple. I looked into xearth and Xplanet, and saw they could do this but on those sites i read that Celestia was better and i think it is. So if you're saying I don't know what i'm talking about, does that mean Celestia isn't better? I'm still going to use it, as it's a fantastic program, I was just curious is all. Isn't that what the forums are for? To get questions answered?

Thank you Selden for your help.

selden wrote:Fridger,

You may have forgotten that there have been previous requests for this capability. Many people would like to have a changing view of space as the backdrop and/or a "screen saver" for their computers.

(While it might be a screen saver, it would certainly be no power saver. Changing 3D graphics use a lot more power from the wall socket than most people realize.)

A previous discussion is here:
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9408&

And a 3D screensaver which shows scenes of the solar system is available at http://www.3dsolarsystem.com/

No I did not forget. I would have answered the same there if had found it worth participating in the discussion.

It is just a joke to misuse Celestia as a screensaver after all the effort that went into it. I find this issue utterly uninspiring

Bye Fridger

faa_70 wrote:Sorry if I offened anyone with my simple question. I wasn't looking for a screen saver but an "updatable" wallpaper ala EarthDesk for Apple. I looked into xearth and Xplanet, and saw they could do this but on those sites i read that Celestia was better and i think it is. So if you're saying I don't know what i'm talking about, does that mean Celestia isn't better? I'm still going to use it, as it's a fantastic program, I was just curious is all. Isn't that what the forums are for? To get questions answered?

Thank you Selden for your help.

You are misjudging what Celestia has been designed for..It is a highly sophisticated, scientifically accurate simulation engine/ visualization framework. Misusing it for just displaying some "trivialities" at the level of the /screen resolution/ is plain ridiculous.

We could have saved 3-4 years of work.

Bye Fridger

faa_70,

There's nothing wrong with your question.

Sometimes people get "tunnel vision" and forget that there are other applications for software that are quite different from their own uses.

At any rate, you might try contacting the author of "3DSolarSystem" to see if he could help. Providing a continuously changing 3D backdrop might be a challange that would interest him. My impression is that the X- programs are making relatively simple changes to 2D images.

selden wrote:
Sometimes people get "tunnel vision" ...

Some people are lacking any kind of vision...

Hey Fridge! Chill matey!

*deleted*

selden wrote:There's nothing wrong with your question.

Imagine asking your Ferrari dealer if he could attach a plow to your Testarossa, he might take offence to it... it's just as wrong as asking for a spoiler to be fitted on a caterpillar.

Excellent comparison, Christophe.



Mind your "tunnel vision", though...

Bye Fridger

Christophe wrote:

selden wrote:There's nothing wrong with your question.

Imagine asking your Ferrari dealer if he could attach a plow to your Testarossa, he might take offence to it... it's just as wrong as asking for a spoiler to be fitted on a caterpillar.

True, but in the case of the Ferrari dealer there is brand awareness amongst the general public. Celestia is not nearly as well known. So forgive newcomers if they don't have a precise awareness of what Celestia is exactly, and the behind-the-scenes details, when they come across it for the first time.

I really don't see why we need to have this culture of "flame the newbie". Really, the question in this thread had been answered satisfactorily in selden's post, and then along we go with a whole load of ranting about how being polite to newbies is totally unacceptable and is a monstrous waste and detracts from the sophistication of the effort.

Can someone please explain just how this kind of "flame at first sight" culture helps anybody?

Can someone please explain why a question about whether Celestia has a certain functionality or not is such a threat to the entire project that it deserves this kind of reaction?

Most of my posts were NOT addressed to the newbie in question, but rather to Selden, who defended the absence of a "screensaver" feature with "Unfortunately"...

I disagreed strongly with the latter which I did not want to hide. I don't think I attacked the person who was asking in the first place.

Just go through the relevant posts once more carefully.

Bye Fridger

I would like to know if there has been any kind of progress on the subject.

Being aware of the power of Celestia, I would love to have it also working as a beautiful window into space. For example, hovering somewhere near Saturn and watching the moons move slowly on your desktop, in real time.

To achieve that, it would be enough for Celestia to load the position and settings you like and have a "gui-less" mode where, instead of opening the user interface, it dumps a shot of the current view as an image file. Then a simple cronjob can do the rest (say, calling it every 10 minutes).