Saturn and Uranus

[HS]

I have been using Celestia since mid June. Its a great program and I'm very pleased with it. I've downloaded many textures and learned how to use them. My one major problem is with Saturn and Uranus. Visiting the Forum I've seen that other users have the same or similar problems. Sometimes I can observe Saturn for 10 minutes or more before Celestia crashes. Uranus crashes almost immediately.

I have tried many of the "cures" suggested on the forum, but they don't work. I have even removed the rings from Saturn and Uranus and turned off the ring shadows. That doesn't work.

Some people have remarked that the problem arises because the planets are ringed. I've put the appropriate rings around Jupiter, and Neptune and they behave well with their rings.

I've put Saturn's and Uranus's rings around Jupiter and Earth! That doesn't crash the program.

The fact that a planet is ringed has nothing to do with the problem.

I've updated my video driver both from the manufacturer and from Microsoft (at one Forum writers suggestion and more than an hour's time downloading). That didn't work.

I think the problem may lie in the "vsop87-saturn" and "vsop87-uranus" parts of the program. Please try fixing this part of the program.

Isn't it about time that this bug was addressed.

Everything works fine but Saturn and Uranus, and this has been going on for a long period of time. Please, please fix Saturn and Uranus in the next update.

Thanks

[chris]

I think the problem may lie in the "vsop87-saturn" and "vsop87-uranus" parts of the program. Please try fixing this part of the program.

I'm absolutely certain that it has nothing to do with the vsop87 orbits.

Isn't it about time that this bug was addressed.

It's working perfectly fine on my system . . . It'd be helpful if you mentioned what graphics card you were using and posted the text displayed from the OpenGL Info window (look in the Help menu.)

--Chris

[HS]

Many thanks for your reply.

I've just been watching Uranus and its moons for one hour without a crash.

I seem to have accidentally solved my problem and I'd like to tell how it happened.

I was trying to update one of the moons of Saturn and was having some problems with the texture file. I discovered that my difficulty arose because I had copies of the file "minormoons.ssc in two folders:

Celestia\extras\minormoons.ssc

Celestia\extras\extras\minormoons.ssc

I changed the second minormoons.ssc file to:

Celestia\extras\extras\minormoons.ssx

to disable it when turning on the Celestia program.

This action solved my texture problem and I discovered that it also solved my problem with Saturn and Uranus.

I have also changed the second minormoons.ssx file back to minormoons.ssc and was able to again make Celestia crash when observing Uranus and Saturn.

I'd suggest that Celestia users having problems with Saturn and Uranus check to see if they have duplicates of the files discussed above.

If the two files are identical there may be no problem, I don't know, but renaming one of the duplicates may solve the crash problem.

Again, thanks for creating a great program, and I hope that this incident may help other users of Celestia.