Celestia Forums

hi:

i am making an animation for a documentary and i need the universe configuration more or less 2 million years ago. i tried in celestia but you cant go that far.
maybe with some calculation it was similar in a more recent date.

this doesnt have to be exact but it would be nice to show something that looked similar.

if this is too much maybe just the solar system.

also, i want to do this in 3dmax so i wonder if i can export this configuration of planets to max.


thanks in advance

Hmmm...
You can't set the time to that date, but it should work if you let the time run backwards until that date. Have you tried that?

maxim

Seems like something of a waste of effort, to me.
In general terms, the solar system is going to look pretty much as it does now - no big changes in appearance or distance from the Sun for any of the planets. A specific Earth texture might be useful, but unless Don has built one for the period in question, there probably isn't one available. In specific terms, the ephemerides aren't accurate so far back, so Celestia isn't going to offer any kind of accurate planetary positions; precession will have altered the planetary axes, but Celestia doesn't currently simulate that; the stars will have moved significantly, but Celestia doesn't simulate that, either. And there's no way to directly export planetary positions to 3D Max.
Sorry to be discouraging, but I think you might as well just place appropriate planet models at appropriate orbital distances from the Sun in 3D Max directly - using Celestia isn't going to improve your portrayal.

Grant

I have to agree with grant. 2 million years is merely a tick of the Second Hand on the Cosmos clock, not that I'm an authority on the subject.
Heck, when viewing the Andromeda galaxy today, we're seeing it 2 million years ago! Maybe 200 million years would show more of a difference.

Tech Sgt. Chen wrote:I have to agree with grant. 2 million years is merely a tick of the Second Hand on the Cosmos clock, not that I'm an authority on the subject.
Heck, when viewing the Andromeda galaxy today, we're seeing it 2 million years ago! Maybe 200 million years would show more of a difference.

If we extended the time range Celestia can represent, we would need to show the movements of the nearby galaxies too. I guess that if deep space objects could have beginning and ending times an animation of the Andromeda galaxy could be made over a short time in like the year 8000 before Fridger's red giant sun appears so that we could see what it would look like. But I didn't find any setLifespan() or getLifespan() in deepskyobj.cpp that body.cpp has.

Brendan

but any idea on how to setup aproximately the solar system?

what about just the polar star and solar system.


if i cant export i just want to see how it should look and then replicate in max.

Actually, the stars place in the sky would've changed quite a bit. If we were to look at the night sky 2 million years ago we wouldn't recognize any of the stars. There would be no constellations as we know them today. The crab nebula ceratinly would not yet exist, and I wonder if the star Betelgeuse was a giant back then. There would also be subtle changes such as earth's axis would be different than now.

[quote="granthutchison"]Seems like something of a waste of effort, to me.
In general terms, the solar system is going to look pretty much as it does now - no big changes in appearance or distance from the Sun for any of the planets.