Celestia Forums

I've recently downloaded a scientifically fantastic piece of software from

http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/hp/vo/partiview/

WAAAY cool. The 'milkyway' dataset optionally displays the positions of hundreds of pulsars, globular clusters, extrasolar planets, planetary nebulas etc etc.

the interface and rendering are geared toward text commands and scientific utility (ie powerful, but awkward and somewhat ugly...), but it makes me greedy enough to ask a couple of Celestia questions:

1) might a future version of celestia include more 'types' of objects such as the ones plotted in this PartiView software?, ie allow optional globular cluster, pulsar, open cluster, SNRs, PNs etc to be added/defined/displayed *as* these kinds of objects and not just generic 'deep sky' objects or extensions to the 'galaxy' catalogs? Ie be able to load/unload or render on/off nebulas, galaxies, PNs etc independantly? Perhaps it's time to think about implimenting a more categorical recognition of accepted astronomical object types? I'm a philosophy PhD student, so perhaps I'm a bit obsessed with 'ontological engineering'... but if there were some way (perhaps extensible rather than hard-coded, with an on-load script?) to define a powerful classificiation system of objects for celestia to recognise for purposes of the solarsystem browser and rendering options... eg it would be nice to see 'spacecraft', and 'moon' but also 'asteroid-aten', 'asteroid-centaur', 'pulsar', 'planetary_nebula' with fields for default options eg 'load' (to change requires restart of course), 'display', 'textures', 'markers' (see below), 'orbits'...

2) might a future version of celestia incorporate non-photorealistic 'schematic markers' like 1ly circles or spheres drawn around the positions of objects of special interest. I notice that the constellation boundries are already drawn as a small 3d sphere centred on sol... would making this kind of redering/definition open to addons be a good idea? Anyway, it looks like the capability to do this kind of thing is already there in Celestia's toolkit (eg a spherical version of celestia's comet tails would already be vastly superior to what PartiView uses)

3) Partiview also maps 'all sky' surveys of different wavelengths (eg from IRAS, H2 frequency radiation, gamma rays, optical-wavelength milky way) as either 'background' textures or on spheres centred on Sol. Again, it's not aesthetically fantastic or realistic from different positions in 3d space, but it allows the full range of astronomical data to be visualised. And again, it seems to me that Celestia already exhibits the kind of rendering capabilities that would make this possible.

4) is an in-client command-line an option for celestia? (or does this already exist?) perhaps to be able to type commands into the 'seach' field that already exists when you hit enter... for example, let celestia recognise anything typed in after a '/' (or some other character) as akin to a single line from a script file.

From my (geeky) point of view, it would be nice to have something with the smooth, fast, aestheticly gorgeous rendering engine (and navigation interface) of Celestia with something like the scientific visualisation power of the modified version of PartiView here (I think it's originally just an engine for visualising any kind of 'particle' system). It seems like it's more likely that celestia can extend itself to this than the other way round, in fact it's already so good it could probably do much better with the data...

wishful?

ok here's an URL of a screenshot that shows what I'm talking about...

http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~carl/Clipboard03.jpg

In this picture a handful of the available options are activated. In the foreground are:
1) the familiar constellation lines, centreed on Sol of course.
2) a flat texture of a spiral galaxy stretched over the plane of the milky way (not sure if it's from a photo of another galaxy or a best-guess representation of our own)
3) a schematic x-y grid with distance markers from the galaxtic centre
4) a 3-d oblate spheroid marking the galactic central bulge
5) a larger 3-d sphere (the viewpoint is inside it, so it looks like a celestial grid), marking the extent of the milky way's galactic halo.
6) faintly visible, a semi-transparent 'bubble' centred on sol with an 'all-sky' photograhic texture of the milky way in optical wavelengths (ie as viewed from earth - when inside it looks fantastic).

other options include a smaller grid centred on Sol, texture bubbles for different wavelengths, markers for pulsars, star-forming regions, planetary nebulas etc that scatter these things across the galaxy, and markers for the local group of galaxies.

I know it's a bit annoying to start making comparisons to other software and I don't mean to detract from Celestia's obvious strengths... but this PartiView thing is a non-commercial package making use of freely available resources for specifically educational purposes, so it's not exactly setting itself up in a spirit of competition, and I thought it was worth mentioning.

Is this helpful for the development of Celestia, or are the design philosophies just too different?

cheers all

http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~carl/Clipboard04.jpg (194kb)

here's a psychodelic screenshot, featuring constelation lines and the starglow turned up a bit; with star labels, stars with extrasolar planets marked by glowing blue rings, and 5 concentric spheres drawn around sol textured with false colour all-sky maps of (from outside, inward):
1) Gamma ray sky,
2) 115GHz radiation sky (UV I think)
3) 21cm radiation sky (microwave or radio?)
4) Infrared sky (from IRAS)
5) an 'Oort cloud' marker sphere

the plane of the milky way is clearly visible in all of them. the 'optical' milky way is stretched out over a far larger sphere, for some reason

I'm going to fish around to see if they list their data sources...