Celestia Forums

WELL, after much trial and error, i have got the models to go in where i want them and actually see them.

I have moved on to adding fictional solar systems and my wife seems to think that celestia is addicting.

A few things i have discovered, and may be of help to others. Win98 seems to have a bad time allowing stc's to be created. I even tried using dos editor to create one and celestia wouldnt recognize it. Granted I am running a hybrid OS with windows and unix functions in the system, which may be the cause of the stc problem.

My work around actually consisted of downloading an stc file, saving a copy and then using it as a template.

Now the question i have is, has anyone every attempted to create sector wide objects?

Yes, Celestia is addicting.

Make sure you've disabled the Windows misfeature "hide common filetypes".

Celestia's catalog files (.stc, .ssc and .dsc) are just plain text files.

To always open a .stc, .ssc or .dsc file as a text file under Win98, hold down the shift key and select the file using your rightmost mouse button. In the popup menu, select the Open with... option. In the new window, select WordPad and check the box labelled "always open with this program" (or some phrase like that: I don't run w98 anymore.)

The .stc filetype also is used by OpenOffice for its proprietary-format spreadsheet files, which can cause some confusion. Celestia's more important that OO, though!

An alternative is to create the file that will become a Celestia catalog file with a .txt filteype. Then copy it to a new file with the .stc extension. Of course, Windows will whine and complain when you do that. Wimpy Windows.

I'm not sure what you mean by "sector wide objects", but Celestia v1.3.1pre3 and later will let you create Nebula objects of any size you want. V1.3.0 has problems with really big ones. See http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/billboard.html#7.2 for one example (an inside-out sphere).

Does this help?

I found Celestia addictive for a short while... nowadays I rarely run it, and only then to check the orientation of a planet, or the position of a galaxy... I'm still using 1.2.5 and I'm not particularly interested in updating.
I've found it easy to become disillusioned with Celestia due to the lacklustre state of the Celestia universe outside the solar system. People seem to be more interested in planets and hi-res planetary textures... personally if I want to explore the Solar System, Orbiter is far more interesting and rewarding.
I put this down to the fact that fleshing out the rest of the Universe with the data we do have will require dynamic detail systems, which could allow a multitude of wonderful things:
* 3-D surface terrain
* Ring particle systems
* Emission/absorption nebulae delineating spiral arms
* Star clouds and globular clusters
Why Celestia doesn't have dynamic detail yet is not simple, but I'm sure it's one or a combination of the following things:
1) People are working on how to do it, but it's very slow going;
2) Dynamic detail got pushed into the "too hard" corner in favour of simpler features like virtual textures and multi-views;
3) Political opposition to dynamic detail on the grounds that it requires too much speculation (or that if someone other than Chris does it, it's "sabotaging the spirit" or some such rubbish).

This comes down to my desire for a more complete Celestia universe, so don't bother arguing about whether Celestia development is on the right track for most people - it probably is. But it'll need dynamic detail for me to be interested in it again.

That's why I still read this forum every few days - that, and I find many of the discussions here to be intelligent and interesting (except for the Windows-bagging which, frankly, becomes rather tedious).

Cheers,
Paul

Actually, i think that fleshing out celestia will probably keep going, and if i could find a way to intergrate the 60 meg messer catalog and find a way not to double entriers, i might just go for it.

Personally I would like to see some form of gravity added to the system, simply because of the universal dynamics.

Anyway, Celestia served as a nice insperation to learn a few more computer skills. Never had a reason to get into 3d graphics before.

I admit, the model needs work, and a lot of it, but here are my first free hand, from scratch attempts

Adelvunegv_waya,

What 60MB catalog are you referring to?

Depending on how you classify them, there are at most 110 Messier (with an i) objects. A textual catalog for Celesita is tiny: only a few KB. See http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/catalogs.html for those.

An addon that includes models and high resolution images of all the objects would be large, but I don't know of any like that.

A Web search for "messer catalog" found some things, but they have nothing to do with astronomy.

Seldon, as soon as i find the link, i will edit the post. I was going to download it to plug into the control program for a remote controlled telescope im building, complete with a webcam interface...
Unfortunately, due to a massive primary harddrive crash, most of my resources went "POOF"... the 80 gig harddrive is now unreadable and data is unretrievable.

http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/adc/adc_cat1_holdings.html here is one link that i use quite a bit

Sorry to admit this, but even though i love stargazing, when the temps drop to below 30 I want to stay INSIDE and look at the stars.