Celestia Forums

I am a complete novice at Celestia but I am slowly learning. I read in the Celestia homepage that using 1.32 you can follow the Cassini Spacecraft on its mission. Would someone give me some tips on how to do that?

Here's one way. There are many others.

1. run celestia
2. set Celestia's internal date to something appropriate, or leave it as is to watch Cassini orbit around Saturn
3. type [return]cassini[return] (where [return] stands for the large carriage-return key at the right side of your main keyboard: select Cassini )
4. type g (goto Cassini: Cassini should appear in the middle of your screen)
5. use the mouse to drag Cassini to a corner of the screen
6. type 6 (select Saturn; or you could select some other body, like Titan)
7. type C (Capital-c) to center the selected body while keeping Cassini on the screen
8. type : (colon = phase lock) to keep the relative positions of Cassini and the selected body fixed on the screen
9. type l (lower-case L) several times (speed up time)
10. watch

Thank you so much Selden. You have given me a terrific lesson in techniques to setup viewing of orbiting bodies and the body that they are orbiting. That is exactly what I needed to know. Those steps will certainly be of great value in other locations as well. I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to teach me that technique but will say thanks very much anyway.

Bob

Wow! Fantastic. Thanks again.

You all are quite welcome, of course.

An addendum:

Don't forget that Celestia can show several viewpoints at the same time if you use the View menu to split the window. Then the different panes can be used to watch several events simultaneously.

e.g. Cassini as seen from Iapetus, Titan from Huygens, Saturn from Cassini, etc.

Unfortunately, as you increase the number of panes, the amount of setup increases too. That's where a script can be quite useful.

Is there a way to set the various views with a different time ? I don't think it's currently possible.

I would like to see in a separate view, say, Saturn the 11 october 2004, and saturn the 21 november 2004 in another view. Is it possible ?

Cham,

Sorry, no. All views are at the same simulated time.

You could run multiple copies of Celestia, though.

I must add my thanks as well.. its amazing how a little help can make the experience so much better... First time I ran the cassini flyby I was manually trying to find and keep saturn in my view... Wow what a difference it is to lock on and keep both in view... that little bit of help dramatically changed things for me.. much less frustration..

thanks again... very nice of you to offer the help..