Celestia Forums

At the moment I'm working on a scene in POV-ray, a visualisation of a comet strike in the Epsilon Eridani system. For the star field I extracted the star positions and spectral types out of stars.dat (in Visual Basic) and converted this to a format which can be accessed in POV-ray to produce a "realistic" star system with the star positions correct as viewed from Eps Eri.

However before I upload this to my deviantART site I'd like to know some stuff - basically is this an ok use of stars.dat and what credits do I need to put with the image?

Thanks,

Chaos

Are you using the original stars.dat that comes with the program? If yes then you might think of using the 50mb stars.dat add-on - a LOT more stars, hehe.

Can't tell you anything about the credits stuff, though.

boo wrote:Are you using the original stars.dat that comes with the program? If yes then you might think of using the 50mb stars.dat add-on - a LOT more stars, hehe.

Uh, it already takes about half an hour to create the image with the stars.dat database as it is...

As far as I can see in the documentation, it should be ok if I state that the starfield was generated using the database in Celestia which was derived from the ESA Hipparcos database. If this is incorrect, please inform me.

chaos syndrome wrote:As far as I can see in the documentation, it should be ok if I state that the starfield was generated using the database in Celestia which was derived from the ESA Hipparcos database. If this is incorrect, please inform me.

I certainly have no problem with you using the Celestia star database in this way. Some credit would be nice, but not required.

--Chris