Celestia Forums

Let's say I want to ditch the existing stars.dat file and make up my own little universe. Is there a way I can put a load of stc entries together into a single text file and convert that into a new stars.dat file to replace the one that Celestia uses?

I figure there must be, or those big Hipparcos stars.dat files wouldn't be possible to make .

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Nice one silly, please read the announcement at the top of this forum.

You will need to write some code. Have a look at buildstardb.cpp in the celestia source, its used to create the stars.dat file.

Er, what announcement? There's nothing in the FAQ thread about this.

So I'd have to compile the stars.dat building code myself? I was hoping that there was an already compiled version of it out there somewhere that I could download (says he, not having C++).

I can probably modify Celestia just slightly so that it can start up without loading stars.dat. As a temporary fix though, it would be easy to create a stars.dat file with just a single star, allowing everything else to be added through .stc files. Would that be adequate?

--Chris

That would be rather spiffy, yes - if it's not too much trouble that would be great! (I'm assuming you mean you'd create the stars.dat file with the one star, because I don't know how to do this)

Heck, assuming the default star wasn't Sol, you could set it up so it's an M9 V star about 3000 lightyears away or something, so it wouldn't show up in Celestia unless you ramped up the magntitudes all the way to maximum.

Thanks!

Chris, that would be a great solution. Currently, stars.dat is the only thing left which has to be handled carefully during installation updates. This work-around would make the new installs completely painless.