Celestia Forums

HI Everyone:

I am pleased to advise that my Celestia Educational Activities add-ons are now updated and extensively revised, and are now available as single zip files on the Motherlode. A new Educational page on the Motherlode is now devoted to them. I have also replaced the older versions of the Activities on my website with new updated versions, all available now as single zip files.

I am also applying to NASA for a grant to advertise and disseminate Celestia and these activities to schools around the U.S., so that kids everywhere can enjoy Celestia as a teaching tool.

To examine and download the Celestia Educational Activities, visit http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/educational.html or http://www.fsgregs.org/celestia

Enjoy

Frank Gregorio

I have tried some of these out tentatively for use with my astronomy students. They love SEEING the things we talk about. While testing the packages out, I happened to notice that the Ring Nebula was missing from the zip package for #6 (my personal favorite), but it is an easy download from the Motherlode. I will post any other discrepancies that I find in my travels. I am actually in the planning stages of my own educational work for Celestia that will enable the students to see a multispectral universe, but I have just started learning how Celestia is put together. Hopefully something will result by the end of the year.

BTW, are the addons at your site (e.g. Activity 6.2 - addons B, in addition to the material contained in the zips on the Motherlode?)

Thank You so much for this work Frank.

Dear Buggs:

Thanks for the heads-up on the Ring Nebula. It is loaded as an add-on in Activity 1-2, and I inadvertently left out a duplicate copy of it in Activity 6, which also uses it. The Activity 6 file is now fixed and corrected.

The Activities on my own website had been older versions of these activities but are now fully updated. You can use either Motherlode.net or my website for downloads. The content is identical.

Please keep me updated on how things are going in your classes.

Regards,

Frank

I tested the activity number 6 (not for a class, I don't have any, but for myself ) This is great ! Very nice work ! When learning meets fun, I'm happy !

Just to let you konw, I noticed two bugs:

- here the activity works fine with celestia-win32-1.3.2.exe but not with celestia-win32-1.4.0pre6.exe (after the educationnal activities install, i get a fatal error - cannot read star database when Celestia is started)

- link to multimedia content is wrong: (in the .doc: 45.) it's ../Multimedia/2NUCLR.MOV and should be ..\..\Multimedia\2NUCLR.MOV (i didnt check the other yet)

Thank you again for your nice work and see you !

Dear Pat:

I'm delighted you've enjoyed the Educational Activity. I am aware of the problem with Celestia 1.4.0pre 6. The Celestia design team has changed how 1.4.0 reads star databases. All older databases designed for use in 1.3.2 and earlier no longer work in 1.4.0 and visa versa. That's a bummer. I wish they had not done that. The prior databases contain between 1 million and 2 million stars, whereas the 1.4.0 database has only 100,000. You can notice the difference in the richness of the starfield in Celestia.

I have a lot of trouble with the links for the Multimedia in the Activities. It seems some versions of MS Office/Word try to "update" the links whenever they open the Activity document. They actually change the links. That can result in the link getting lost. Also, the Multimedia links in the Activity point to only 1 place; the Multimedia folder that is placed in the main Celestia folder on drive C:. If a user does not download/unzip the Activities only to the Celestia folder on drive C:, none of the media links will work. They can be manually changed inside the document to point to the correct spot, however.

Anyway, I hope you get a chance to try out all of the Activities.

Enjoy.

Frank G

Activity 6 doesnt work here either...I have the newest version of Celestia, and I have put all the files in to right place, but they dont appear in Celestia. Any help in this?

DarkCrawler90 wrote:Activity 6 doesnt work here either...I have the newest version of Celestia, and I have put all the files in to right place, but they dont appear in Celestia. Any help in this?

The educational activities won't work correctly with Celestia version 1.4.0 without making a modification. You must use Celestia version 1.3.2 for the educational activities. They work fine on my machine.

Dear Dark Crawler:

Let me know what version of Celestia you have, and I'll get you up and running in no time. If you are using the new beta version of Celestia (version 1.4.0), the Activities won't work until you change a single line in one file.

To change that line, use a text editor (Notepad or WordPad) to open the file in the Celestia main folder named "celestia.cfg". That file came with the Activities and is custom designed to run the Activities.

A few lines down from the top is a line which reads,

StarDatabase "data/bigstars.dat"

Change that line to read

StarDatabase "data/stars.dat"

(remove the word "big"). SAve the file.

The Activities will now work. If they do not, let me know.

Frank G

Still not working.

Any way that I could get the older version to work?

Dark Crawler:

Are you using version 1.4.0?

What are the symptoms of the Activity not working? Do you get an error message? What is it? Does the program try to open and hang?

Where are the activity files residing? In what specifi folder did you put them?

Frank

fsgregs wrote:Dark Crawler:

Are you using version 1.4.0?

What are the symptoms of the Activity not working? Do you get an error message? What is it? Does the program try to open and hang?

Where are the activity files residing? In what specifi folder did you put them?

Frank

Im using version 14.0.

When I click the here texts on the MS Word file, it takes me to the right place, but there is nothing there.

I but each activity file to their place, in medres, models and such.

Dear Dark Crawler:

When I click the here texts on the MS Word file, it takes me to the right place, but there is nothing there.

I but each activity file to their place, in medres, models and such

The fact that Celestia version 1.4.0 launches but there is nothing present at the locations you click on the "here" links in the Activity, means that the program cannot find the object files to load. Either the celestia.cfg file you are using to launch Celestia is not the one I included with the Activities, or you have placed the Activity add-ons in the wrong spot.

First, let's talk about the celestia.cfg file. The one I included with the Activities MUST be used with the Activities. However, it will not work with version 1.4.0 until that line I mentioned in an earlier post is changed. Once changed, the program and the "here" links in the Activities should work. To make sure you are using the cfg file that comes with my Activities, open the file with a text editor. The first line of the file should read,
"Celestia Configuration File - for Educational Activities"

If it does not, you are not using the correct cfg file and none of my Activities will work or load.

If you are using the cfg file I included, then the problem lies with the location of the other files in the Activity. Specifically"

1. You need to download the "General_add-ons_download zip file, and unzip it directly into your Celestia main folder.

2. The downloaded Activity zip files also need to be unzipped directly into the Celestia main folder, not into the extras folder or into any other folder.

The folder tree should look like this:

Celestia
..............celestia.cfg (file)
..............lots more files
.......data (folder)
.......models (folder)
.......textures (folder)
.......extras (folder)
.......educational-extras (folder)
.......multimedia (a folder included with certain activities only)
.......several more folders that come with Celestia

Inside the educational-extras folder will be several other folders ,including one that contains the written Activities themselves.

If you have all this arranged this way, then I don't know what else to tell you, except to suggest you try the download and unzipping again.

The only other thing I can think of is a small possibility that your system clock is not set to the correct time. I don't know if that will affect the time used by an imbedded cel:url link (the here links) in Celestia, but ....

Let me know if you can debug things further.

Frank

Hi Mr Gregorio.
Educational activities along with general add-ons package, were the first extra files I downloaded and installed on Celestia 1.3.2 a few months ago, when I found out about this excellent software.
Flying around, though, I noticed that, modified with all those those add-ons I cited above, some elements were missing. I thought perhaps due to a few little mistakes when editing the solarsys.ssc into the new educational-solarsys.ssc. Fact is that some elements in this file point to nonexistant models or texture, in the standard Celestia 1.3.2 that the Activities and general add-on packages are supposed to go with. Just two examples: Tethys doesn't show at all, along with other minor moons, though pressing M the name tag appears floating alone in the space. Enceladus uses the general asteroid.jpg texture instead of its own.
I edited educational-solarsys.ssc recovering all the missing parts from the normal solarsys.ssc and things started to work ok.
I was curious to know of other Celestia users having the same problems, but I must have missed the right thread in the forum.

Dear Giorgio:

Thanks for the post. I will be updating all of the Activities over the summer, with new add-ons, new links, and a revision to work in either Celestia 1.3.2 or 1.4.0

I have not received word from others that some of the textures do not display, but I will be updating them all anyway, so I guess it will fixed.

Sorry if you had some problems.

Regards,

Frank G

No problems at all. Just thought I could help by reporting a few minor issues I happened to come across while using Celestia enhanced with your works, for which I thank you

fsgregs wrote:Dear Pat:

I have a lot of trouble with the links for the Multimedia in the Activities. It seems some versions of MS Office/Word try to "update" the links whenever they open the Activity document. They actually change the links. That can result in the link getting lost. Also, the Multimedia links in the Activity point to only 1 place; the Multimedia folder that is placed in the main Celestia folder on drive C:.

Frank G

I had this problem also. I got around this by opening all the docs in openoffice and then saving as html. I manually corrected the links by a single "replace all" from "http://cel://" to "cel://". Everything works fine now so maybe a release as html may be better. (no compatibility problems then whether using linux or anything else)

Regards Pete