Celestia Forums

:?: Chris, I've pressed the ~ key (ALT+126 on my keyboard), and I saw the text "Edit mode" on the top of the screen... what does it mean? What "Edit mode" do?
Regards
Anarion

Hmm... I stumbled upon this a while ago, although I didn't know you could press ~ to get it - I just thought something i'd done had activated it by accident. So... what does it do?

It doesn't do anything particularly interesting . . .

I added it because I needed to manipulate the orientations of the galaxies until they approximately matched photographs. Once in edit mode, you can shift+left+right drag the mouse to rotate a currently selected galaxy.

--Chris

Just thought I'd mention that the Nearby Galaxies Catalog (NBG) by R. Brent Tully includes celestial coordinates (1950), distance in megaparsecs, diameter in kiloparsecs, inclination from face-on, morphological classification, and luminosity data for 2000+ galaxies within 40 megaparsecs.

I think all that's missing is the position angle of the major axis, which is available in the Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (RC3) by de Vaucouleurs et al.

Both these sources (and many more) are available in electronic form from NASA's Astronomical Data Center. The URL is:

http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/

- Hank

hank wrote:Both these sources (and many more) are available in electronic form from NASA's Astronomical Data Center. The URL is:

http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Excellent! I'll start using this data for Celestia to make tours outside the Milky Way a bit more interesting. Thanks for the link; this is exactly the data source that I was hoping to find to expand Celestia's galaxy catalog.

--Chris

Yay! I was hoping to hear that...I cant wait to see the Sombrero Galaxy!

Question though...How would you go about making the galaxies appear as in the Hubble photos? I suspect you would have to add all the stars? and well I guess that would slow down Celestia immensely

The galaxy's in Celestia aren't really that interesting - they're dark, a shade of grey, and are just a load of dots. Couldn't you make a galaxy - shaped mesh and texture it with a Hubble photo? We'd have to assume it was the same from both sides, but...

The problem is that flying into (or even near) a textured object looks badly, or just would'n work.

But, i really want to know, how many stars can celestia handle?

Could you just mail me a copy of your stardb-builder, i'd create a random Star generator and play around a bit...

btw, could someone tell me if the 11 MB package in downloads is only the source or the source + Data?
#if Onlyource then
please could somebody email me only the source (Zipped) w/o the Data (with a 56k 10 MB is MUCH!
#else
ithen i have to dl it...
#end if
my email is johannes.ebke@web.de

Go here for the source code http://sourceforge.net/....

You will need a SourceForge account though

Rassilon wrote:Go here for the source code http://sourceforge.net/....

You will need a SourceForge account though

Well, you don't! You can get the code from SourceForge-CVS by anonymous login. Go to
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=21302
and have a look at the description there.

First time you do that, the whole repository (including textures and such) will be downloaded. But later you can just say "cvs update" and only the changed files will have to be pushed through thin telephone lines.

thx :-)

fortunately, i already have an sourceforge account *g*