Celestia Forums

is there a way of going into orbit of a planet, moon, asteroid, comet, etc. ?

I know of Follow, chase, track, sync orbit but there doesn't seem to be "orbit".

I would like to be in orbit of Pluto in the same way that the Moon is in orbit of Earth now, not sync orbit, but just being in orbit.


thanks

I'm not sure if this is what you mean but;
Right-click>Drag works for a sort of orbit.
The more experienced members might be able to answer you're question for an orbit option but I don't there is one yet.Then again I haven't installed 1.3.1 pre releases yet
still running on 1.3.0.

- Shadow

I think the quick answer is "No."
Celestia is not a space-flight simulator.

You might want to investiate the program "Orbiter", which is a real spaceflight simulator.

Also, "Mostly Harmless" is a variant of Celestia which (at least used to) provides gravity effects that operate on the observer. You might want to investigate that, too.

As I'm sure you've found, perhaps the closest to being in orbit (as a realtime command) is to use Follow and watch the object turn beneath you.

One way something like it could be done in Celestia (any version) would be to define appropriate orbits in an SSC file and then follow them. Another would be to create a script that contains a sequence of appropriate GoTo commands.

Sorry.

I think that should be something not very difficult to implement.

Without converting Celestia in a Spaceship simulator, I think that from the astronmical point of view the capability of placing the observer in some special orbit like geostationary or Lagrangian Points should be somewhat interesting.

But I think that without a minimal gravity implementation these are features that have a small relevance.

Bye - Paolo