Celestia Forums

Hi all,

for people who think like me that the present 'celestia-splash' image is little inspiring and also too small, here is an alternative. I made it in a few minutes, but it will for sure not be my last attempt.


After downloading it from here,

http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/celestia-splash.jpg

just replace the default splash image in the top celestia directory.

Bye Fridger

Hello,

Which font did you use? I'd like to get it if possible.

christoria wrote:Hello,

Which font did you use? I'd like to get it if possible.

Since I was in a hurry when I made the start-up image, I just picked a font that I found suitable (without remembering its name). It belonged to the hundreds of fonts in the GIMP freefont/sharefont set. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find it again...

Bye Fridger

second try



Download:
http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/celestia-splash-2.jpg

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:just replace the default splash image in the top celestia directory.

Fridger,

Sorry to bother again, but do you mean that we should replace the logo.png
file? I tried putting the image in the main directory, but without any
instruction, Celestia did not utilize it when opening. Should it?

Or, have I simply mis-installed my Celestia 1.3.2? I see no references to
a "splash" image.

Thanks, Bob

PS - Tis truly an inspired image even if I can't use it yet. Beautiful.

Bob Hegwood wrote:

t00fri wrote:just replace the default splash image in the top celestia directory.

Fridger,

Sorry to bother again, but do you mean that we should replace the logo.png
file? I tried putting the image in the main directory, but without any
instruction, Celestia did not utilize it when opening. Should it?

Or, have I simply mis-installed my Celestia 1.3.2? I see no references to
a "splash" image.

Thanks, Bob

PS - Tis truly an inspired image even if I can't use it yet. Beautiful.

Hi Bob,

nice to interact again! Sorry for my recent "elusiveness".

Good you bring this point up:

I have not checked Celestia for Windows more recently. Perhaps there is no provision for a splash image yet? In the Celestia-KDE variant, Christophe has introduced a 'celestia-splash.jpg' that resides in the top Celestia directory and is displayed while Celestia is starting up.

If there is no splash image for Windows, then I better stop creating further images...after all Linux is about to vanish from the scene (hi hi)

Bye Fridger

I need to add support for splash images to the Windows version. I may have time for that tonight (though working on extended star systems is much more fun . . . )

--Chris

Fridger and Chris,

Thanks Dr. Schrempp for the beautiful images. Would love to be
able to see Celestia open with a splash page using one of these images.
By the way, you haven't been elusive, you are just a busy guy.
Many thanks for the explanation.

Chris, no hurry on my account. I'm having plenty of fun just playing with
the new system. I've tried it on my limited PC at a higher screen resolution,
and it seems that there are a few things I can now do on my Intel PC
(using a screen at a higher resolution than 800x600) that I could NOT do
at the lower resolution. Am having fun seeing what new features I can
now use that I couldn't use before. Why the difference in resolution should
make more features available is beyond me, but they are there now none-the-less.

As always, thank you gentlemen.

Take care, Bob

chris wrote:I need to add support for splash images to the Windows version. I may have time for that tonight (though working on extended star systems is much more fun . . . )

--Chris

Aha! What about a "random splash selector feature" picking images from some pool directory, such that the users can enjoy some real surprise each time Celestia starts up...

Bye Fridger

PS:
I am enjoying the new "binary orbit" developments very much...

If there is demand, I could easily hack another Perl script to generate at once thousands of binary orbits in the adequate Celestia input format from the official double star catalogs. As you know, Perl can calculate very well and accurately. It's easy to make the script decide on the fly what parameters to use to derive the orbits in each case...

Yet, after finishing up with a most exciting international conference on Particle Cosmology last weekend at my laboratory [DESY] (organized in part by my theoretical physics department),

http://www.desy.de/desy-th/workshop2004/index.html

I am increasingly sad that the "cosmology mode" idea of Celestia does seem to stagnate entirely.

Incidentally:


For people interested in some of the excellent talks, just click on "Transparencies" for downloading the plenary talks. They are typically in PDF format, so Acrobat Reader will be fine.

In the light of the cosmic neutrino discussion we are having in the Physics and Astronomy department, looking into the talks by C. Spiering and (famous) G.Sigl would certainly be worthwhile...

Also the introductory lecture by Ruth Durrer, about the status of extracting the basic cosmological parameters from the WMAP data is excellent! In her talk as well as in the talk on "Large Scale Structure and Sloan Digital Sky Survey" by J. Friemann, it becomes dramatically obvious how crucially the merging of the information
from Sloan about the mass power spectrum with the WMAP results for the cosmic microwave background, eliminates remaining ambiguities about the cosmologigal parameters and inflation.

Bye Fridger

chris wrote:I need to add support for splash images to the Windows version. I may have time for that tonight (though working on extended star systems is much more fun . . . )

--Chris

Any chance you could post a few screenshots of the things you're working on at the moment, to get us all drooling?

t00fri wrote:If there is demand, I could easily hack another Perl script to generate at once thousands of binary orbits in the adequate Celestia input format from the official double star catalogs.

As you might guess, I've been looking at this too. Do you have a plan for which data sources you are going to collate, and what identifiers you will use to make the collation? The 6th catalog of orbits of visual binary stars, for instance, is laid out in a way that seems intended to thwart efforts to retrieve essential information about the secondary components!

Grant

granthutchison wrote:

t00fri wrote:If there is demand, I could easily hack another Perl script to generate at once thousands of binary orbits in the adequate Celestia input format from the official double star catalogs.

As you might guess, I've been looking at this too. Do you have a plan for which data sources you are going to collate, and what identifiers you will use to make the collation? The 6th catalog of orbits of visual binary stars, for instance, is laid out in a way that seems intended to thwart efforts to retrieve essential information about the secondary components!

Addendum: I've already made a mass conversion of the plane-of-sky orbital elements in the 6th catalog to Celestia's ecliptic frame, harvesting distances from Hipparcos in order to make the conversion from an angular semimajor axis to a distance in AU ... I'll send you a tab-delimited text file containing these data if it'll save you any work.

Grant

granthutchison wrote:

granthutchison wrote:

t00fri wrote:If there is demand, I could easily hack another Perl script to generate at once thousands of binary orbits in the adequate Celestia input format from the official double star catalogs.

As you might guess, I've been looking at this too. Do you have a plan for which data sources you are going to collate, and what identifiers you will use to make the collation? The 6th catalog of orbits of visual binary stars, for instance, is laid out in a way that seems intended to thwart efforts to retrieve essential information about the secondary components!

Addendum: I've already made a mass conversion of the plane-of-sky orbital elements in the 6th catalog to Celestia's ecliptic frame, harvesting distances from Hipparcos in order to make the conversion from an angular semimajor axis to a distance in AU ... I'll send you a tab-delimited text file containing these data if it'll save you any work.

Grant

Grant,

just got home...I'll get back to this interesting issue tomorrow. Today was again one of these very long working days...

Bye Fridger

granthutchison wrote:

granthutchison wrote:

t00fri wrote:If there is demand, I could easily hack another Perl script to generate at once thousands of binary orbits in the adequate Celestia input format from the official double star catalogs.

As you might guess, I've been looking at this too. Do you have a plan for which data sources you are going to collate, and what identifiers you will use to make the collation? The 6th catalog of orbits of visual binary stars, for instance, is laid out in a way that seems intended to thwart efforts to retrieve essential information about the secondary components!

Addendum: I've already made a mass conversion of the plane-of-sky orbital elements in the 6th catalog to Celestia's ecliptic frame, harvesting distances from Hipparcos in order to make the conversion from an angular semimajor axis to a distance in AU ... I'll send you a tab-delimited text file containing these data if it'll save you any work.

Grant

Do we agree about the best catalog for binaries, containing most of the data that we'd need to covert to Celestia format?

I traditionally consulted the Washington Double star catalog. Can you point me to the one you have been looking into (6th catalog of orbits of visual binary stars)?

Clearly I am most interested in your data for the mass conversion of the plane-of-sky orbital elements.

I did not do much yet in terms of formulae, accuracy and data studies. If you are ahead with this, I would be keen to learn what you did already. Then hacking the Perl script would be a very fast affair. After all, I speak Perl fluently;-)

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:I traditionally consulted the Washington Double star catalog. Can you point me to the one you have been looking into (6th catalog of orbits of visual binary stars)?

It has a complete set of elements for 1,817 binaries:
http://ad.usno.navy.mil/wds/orb6.html. Unfortunately, the secondary stars are very poorly identified, so some cross-correlation is required.
WDS contains only proper motions, separations and position angles, doesn't it? Or has there been a revision of its contents?

Grant

I now did also some preparative explorations:
------------------------------------------------------
--clearly WDS is unsuitable for our task to implement binary orbits in Celestia.

--the 6th catalog seems to be the best and most complete/recent source of visual binary elements

--In addition there are several hundred orbital elements of spectroscopic doubles in
http://ad.usno.navy.mil/wds/dsl/SB8/sb8.html
that might be exploited...

--I extracted a nice text file of the 6th catalog and an explanation file of the various columns as a basis to work on with Perl.
The "raw" files may be downloaded from here:

Nonexperts note: this material is not yet usable in Celestia!

http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/6thbinarycat.txt.zip
along with the explanation (further edited my me)
http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/images/columns.txt
For the (dominant) Windows community, I have added a CRLF line ending and packed the catalog as a *.zip file.

--Grant:
I think that it may be better to do all conversions in one Perl script as well. So what were the formulae you have used so far to do your conversions? Which version of the Hipparcos catalog did you use for the distances?

Do you have a Windows installation of Perl? If not why? There is a nice one available that I use on my XP Laptop.
Even if you are reluctant to learn Perl, you might easily make obvious changes and rerun things...

--Given the clean quality graduation (1...5..8,9) in the 6th catalog, I propose I code a Perl script that tags on grade 1..3 orbits as a start.

Bye Fridger

...several hours later...

I think I now got more or less the transformation of the plane-of-sky elements as given in the 6th catalog... to Celestia's ecliptic-based coordinates for my Perl script. What remains is a thorough check of these formulae...I am working on it. Writing the corresponding Perl conversion script will be comparatively fast & easy...

The final step is to extract the system's spectral classes and distance from the HIP data base. Since my download speed is slow, I have not yet inspected what exactly is available in the HIP catalog...We'll see

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:The final step is to extract the system's spectral classes and distance from the HIP data base. Since my download speed is slow, I have not yet inspected what exactly is available in the HIP catalog...We'll see

Fridger,

If it would save you time, you can download a text file with all the stars from the HIP catalog correllated with spectra types:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~claurel/celest ... ypesWD.txt

--Chris

chris wrote:

t00fri wrote:The final step is to extract the system's spectral classes and distance from the HIP data base. Since my download speed is slow, I have not yet inspected what exactly is available in the HIP catalog...We'll see

Fridger,

If it would save you time, you can download a text file with all the stars from the HIP catalog correllated with spectra types:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~claurel/celest ... ypesWD.txt

--Chris

Wow, that's it;-)

Now if there is also a file with the distances, it would even be better;-)

Bye
Fridger

If you've updated Celestia from CVS recently, there should be a file in the data directory called stars.txt. This is the human-editable file from which stars.dat is built. There are six fields per line: HIP catalog number, RA in decimal degrees, declination, distance, apparent magnitude, and spectral type (same as in spectypesWD.txt.) It's a lot more compacy than the complete HIPPARCOS catalog, but contains all the information you should need. It's also got all of Grant's corrections for errors in the HIPPARCOS catalog.

--Chris