Celestia Forums

I'm not a new user to Celestia but I am a new user to this forum. If I make an error somewhere, please correct me.

I've been making a new galaxies.dat that includes all the globular clusters of the Milky Way as well as the galaxies of the Local Group ... I might expand it later to include the galaxies of galactic groups near by.

I am currently using v1.2.4 and would like to beg out (chicken out) of beta testing v1.2.5 due to an already unstable computer. Still, I'd like to be able to select the galaxies and clusters I've been creating and go to them. One solution might be to create stars (perhaps black holes) in the centers of each galaxy and GC with the same name as the galaxy itself. This would solve this particular problem and, most likely, other problems I'm sure to devise in the future. As I understand it, though, I get to make new stars in v1.2.5 using an .stc file but that does not exist in v1.2.4. This means I'll need to make or edit a binary file of these new stars.

My questions are these:

1) Does anyone know how to make or edit a binary file of stars?

2) can I do this in the celestia.cfg:

StarDatabase [ "data/stars.dat" "data/mystars.dat" ]

and expect celestia to load both stars.dat and mystars.dat as star databases?

3) What known complications will 1 & 2 cause?

Thank you ahead of time for your consideration,
Ellis Ellimar

I just thought of doing some simple experiments on the question of a second binary file for celestia's stars.

First I tried to put a second galaxies.dat to see if it would accept it. Nope. In fact, if you write ["data/galaxies.dat"] in celestia.cfg, it will see the "[" and ignore the entry: no galaxies are then loaded. So, no, you can not have two galaxy data files and expect them to be loaded.

Second I tried to put in ["data/stars.dat"] and celestia gave me an error message. So, no. You can not have a second stars database either.

Lastly, I believe I have found the answer to the question of how to create or edit a binary file: I have to make a program to do it.

Sorry for wasting everyone's time.
Ellis Ellimar

Hello Ellis,

I am new here, so I don't know how to help you (yet). When I look at the whole of the MilkyWay, I can see a few galaxies hanging around. And I almost burned my mouse wheel whilst looking for these other galaxies.

It would be nice to have a few more galaxies of the Local Group in the data base too. What... to have all known galaxies, but I don't know if my computer can handle this. I downloaded the new big stars.dat and if I show all the stars and look around in our part of the milkyway I get about 1 frame per second, (and the screen is all white )

My computer is a Athlon1400 256Mb Win98se with A Radeon 8500 64Mb graphics card, it works fine with the original stars.dat.

But I think that Chris can help you. I think he wrote this program.


And a big thanks to all whom made this program... Great !

Update: I just saw that Paul posted a newer & bigger version:
http://ennui.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1107

There is an expanded galaxy file:http://ennui.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=768&highlight=galaxies
You may need to switch on galaxy labels to see it clearly.

Well, that blows everything I've done out of the water... Damn! All that time wasted!

Still... Wow! That's cool!
Ellis Ellimar