Celestia Forums

It's possible now to watch the moons of Jupiter eclipse each other, follow the Voyager spacecraft on their grand tours of the solar system, and see the eclipse of Xerxes in 479 B.C.E.

So, uh, how do we find it?

Navigation->Select Object->Type in "Voyager" (or Voyager 1, Voyager 2, etc) doesn't seem to be working.

Is there some mystery addon that 1.2.5 needs for this to work correctly?

alpha,

i read the post too, and thought this may come up...
if you go to the Celestia homepage, to the left it will say " related sites"
click it, and go to Ian Rivera's page, or click this link http://bruckner.homelinux.net/addons.html on his site, theres a spot to click called "addons", hit that, you will find a slew of goodies

I installed the addon, the paths that the voyagers take seem to be very.. linear. They don't go near any of the planets.

Depending on which Voyager xyz trajectory file you're using, it might not have enough samples around the times of the various flybys. Unfortunately, Celestia only does a linear interpolation between adjacent xyz samples. If the samples are too far apart, the spacecraft will seem to take a shortcut instead of flying around a planet.

For a while even Chris thought there was something wrong with Celestia when Galileo was missing the Earth by 100,000 km during its gravity-assist flyby. Galileo seemed to be bypassing the Earth on the opposite side from where it actually went. This was simply because the samples weren't frequent enough for that part of its trajectory. Once the frequency of samples was increased from 1 every 2 days to 1 every 5 minutes or less, Celestia showed Galileo following the right path.

For what it's worth, the part of Voyager 2's trajectory past Neptune is available on my Web site with 15 minute sampling intervals. Using this, Celestia v1.2.5 does an excellent job of reproducing the Triton flyby.

See http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/spacecraft.html#3.4.10

Here's what I'm seeing at the moment:


Voyager 1


Voyager 2

The paths go near the planets that the craft have last visited, but other than that, I dont see any correlation between their paths and the real thing.

That's a "known restriction" in how orbit paths are drawn. Apparently that code needs a thorough overhaul in order to draw xyz orbits properly. If you have your viewpoint follow along behind the probe, however, it zips past the planets and moons where it should.