Celestia Forums

Newbie alert - I appologose if this topic has previously been done to death...

Is it possible to configure Celestia to support "horse shoe" orbits?

There's at least two bodies that support this type of orbit in the solar system: an asteriod 3753 Cruithne and Saturn's moon Epimetheus (with Janus).

I see mention of a few interesting orbit parameters in the solarsys.ssc file but nothing has struck me yet.

Here's a few refs (incl orb elements in the Cruithne FAQ):
http://www.nature.com/nsu/991007/991007-2.html
http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html

I find this motion fascinating and I'd love to use Celestia to "take a ride" on one of the objects.

Thanks
SteveH

I'd love to see Cruithne... its orbit was described in the sci-fi book "Time" by Stephen Baxter (which, by the way, is excellent) but it was very difficult to visualise. Anyone who's read the book (Anyone out there ?) will understand why I'd like a glowing electric blue hoop somewhere on the surface...
Sorry I can't be of more help. All I can say is, I've never seen any mention of these types of orbits before so it probably is a truly original suggestion.


(Mad Boris)

It's possible to create 'interesting' orbits in Celestia, but you have to actually modify the Celestia code in order to do it. If Celestia had a real scripting language, you could write small scripts to describe exotic orbits. For now however, the choices are use an elliptical orbit or write C++ :/ If I get the time, I'll try implementing horseshoe orbits for the Saturnian satellites.

--Chris

You ought to open the doors with an external scripting language Chris...Allow anything to be created by simply scripting it and adding the scripts to the extras folder...Save time for you making all this new stuff like Nebulas, Pulsars, Different orbital paths and the like...We can do it for you