Celestia Forums

I am new to Celestia and was trying to recreate the famous photo of the Earth as seen from the Moon. I position myself on the Moon's surface and every view of the Earth is way smaller than in the photograph.

Is Celestia out of scale? Was that photo taken with an incredible telephoto lens...probably not?

Change the field of view with the ',' and '.' keys and you should be able to get what you want

Cheers,
Paul

Howdy Scott,

Welcome to the world of Celestia! ... It can sometimes be as complex as using Premiere or Edius. ... Yep, I'm the same Don G. from the Canopus video forum. Good to see you here Scott!

There should be a file in the celestia directory named "KbdMouseJoyControls.txt" which describes most of the keyboard and mouse controls. This should help you move around and set things up the way you want.

Hope this helps.

Hi Don! Thanks Paul,

I've tried those things, and i can get it to look good, but shouldn't the Earth look fairly large as seen from the Moon? At least larger than the Moon does as seen from the Earth?

Is there a way to get the ALt-Az of a body as viewed from the earth?

Scott Chapin wrote:I've tried those things, and i can get it to look good, but shouldn't the Earth look fairly large as seen from the Moon? At least larger than the Moon does as seen from the Earth?

Yes, but only by the amount that Earth's diameter is bigger than the Moon's diameter.

Remember, Earth's diameter is ~13000 km, but it's ~360000 km away as seen from the moon, that is about the size of a human 50m away.

Is there a way to get the ALt-Az of a body as viewed from the earth?

You can try my Alt-Azimuth script, which displays the Alt/Az for the center of the screen.
http://www.h-schmidt.net/celestia/

Harald

The Earthrise photo is undoubtedly a telephoto - think of the disappointingly small size of the Moon in the sky if you take a photo with a standard lens from the Earth. The Earth will appear a few times larger in the Moon's sky, but would still look quite tiny seen through a 50mm lens.

Grant

[quote="HarryYou can try my Alt-Azimuth script, which displays the Alt/Az for the center of the screen.
http://www.h-schmidt.net/celestia/

Harald[/quote]


Vielen Dank!

I'm new to this, so I'll grab it and figure out scripting.

granthutchison wrote:The Earthrise photo is undoubtedly a telephoto - think of the disappointingly small size of the Moon in the sky if you take a photo with a standard lens from the Earth. The Earth will appear a few times larger in the Moon's sky, but would still look quite tiny seen through a 50mm lens.

Grant

I guess so. The earth is 3.66 times the size of the Moon, so I figured it would look quite large from the Moon. Human eyes must act like telephoto lenses, as we concentrate on our center of focus.

IOW, the Moon looks large to me, but she really isn't that large.

Wow Don,

I see you are acknowledged in the German Benutzer Handbuch....way to go!

Howdy Scott,

Prob'ly 'cause I wrote the original English version -- if yer talkin' about the CEL Scripting Guide.

Celestia is the reason for my lack of video work and activity on the Storm 2 forum <sigh>. Been quite active here since Feb or Mar of 2003 -- over a year now !

Found Celestia to be a bit more fun (and addicting) than messing with all the different video software required to produce a simple homemade DVD -- and now everything has new versions to buy and learn . Such is life. Hasn't stopped me from taking video though!

Now, I'm also very involved with the new Celestia Motherlode web site that is collecting and storing Celestia add-ons in ONE place, on ONE server -- currently about 9 GB worth and climbing every day.

Hope you enjoy Celestia as much as everyone else here does!

Hey Don,

Yes, I can see where this could become very addicting. I think I'm bit already. Now I'll have to read your scripting manual.

Scott Chapin wrote:I am new to Celestia and was trying to recreate the famous photo of the Earth as seen from the Moon.

Scott,

Don't know if you'd be interested or not, but Mario Rossi at Space Graphics
has a great little wallpaper image of the view you're looking for...

It's freely available HERE.

Take care, Bob

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the link. Those photos are beauts. Wish I'd have been the photographer!

Yeah, I hear ya...

By the way, don't pay too much attention to Don here. We just
kind of put up with him because he's such a pain in the Wazoo!

Just kidding... I love the guy.

Take care, Bob

like this one it is a screenshot from celestia and not the famous earthrise