Celestia Forums

I would like to edit the stars.dat file. What editor do I use?

Howdy Polchei,

I don't think this file is directly editable, since it requires a program in the Celestia project to build it. If I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will tell me <smile>.

-Don G.

Polchei,

Why do you want to edit stars.dat?

There may be other solutions to your problem. Creating a STar Catalog (STC file), for example, might be one.

I know I can make a .stc file, but I wanted to make just a minor change in the stars.dat file. I wanted to add one star to the stars.dat file - wolf 359, which is the 3rd nearest star to the sun. I don't care to make a .stc file just for wolf 359 which is not a prominent star and doesn't deserve its own file just for that one star, but it should have been in the stars.dat file.

selden wrote:Polchei,

Why do you want to edit stars.dat?

There may be other solutions to your problem. Creating a STar Catalog (STC file), for example, might be one.

Polchei,

Wolf359 is to dim for Hipparcos to measure its position, which is why it is not in Celestia's stars.dat.

I have to admit that I don't understand your hesitation to create an STC file for it. That's exactly what textual STC files are for -- making it easy to add a database of a limited number of stellar objects to Celestia. Text files are larger and slower to load per star than the binary stars.dat file, which is why a text file wasn't used for the primary stars database. (Given the rapid advances in computer and disk speeds, I suspect this argument won't be relevant for much longer.)

However, you should seriously consider downloading Grant Hutchison's NearStars addon. It provides an STC catalog of all of the known stars within 25LY of the Earth, including Wolf 359.

It's available at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/hutchison/nearstars.html

Does this help?