Celestia Forums

I have a suggestion for Celestia's time dilation. Is it possible for you to travel far from an object, zoom in, and see it as it was in the past. So when you take off light time delay, the objects you see will jump to their actual positions (seeing in real time).

Chrisr wrote:I have a suggestion for Celestia's time dilation. Is it possible for you to travel far from an object, zoom in, and see it as it was in the past. So when you take off light time delay, the objects you see will jump to their actual positions (seeing in real time).

The way that light time delay is currently implemented wouldn't be my personal preference. I suppose it is useful in some circumstances, as somebody explained a while ago, but as implemented it is somewhat obscure what the display really means. As far as I can tell, to see objects as they look with delay included, you have to turn on the subtract-delay option, note the time, turn it off again, then run time back to the time that was displayed before.

It would make more sense to me to either *add* the light delay to the current time (so that the displayed time corresponds to what you would see at that time), or move the *objects* back to where they would be at the current time minus the delay, as Chrisr suggested.

Matt McIrvin wrote:

Chrisr wrote:I have a suggestion for Celestia's time dilation. Is it possible for you to travel far from an object, zoom in, and see it as it was in the past. So when you take off light time delay, the objects you see will jump to their actual positions (seeing in real time).

The way that light time delay is currently implemented wouldn't be my personal preference. I suppose it is useful in some circumstances, as somebody explained a while ago, but as implemented it is somewhat obscure what the display really means. As far as I can tell, to see objects as they look with delay included, you have to turn on the subtract-delay option, note the time, turn it off again, then run time back to the time that was displayed before.

It would make more sense to me to either *add* the light delay to the current time (so that the displayed time corresponds to what you would see at that time), or move the *objects* back to where they would be at the current time minus the delay, as Chrisr suggested.

In version 1.3.1 appearing soon, I have incorporated a much more intuitive way to account for LT delay. LT delay as contained in 1.3.0 made its way /accidentally/ into the distribution at an early programming stage through a respective patch that I had sent Christophe for testing;-)...

Bye Fridger

that's absolutely awesome