Celestia Forums

I'm new to this, in fact in new in astronomy in all , and I like it.

And i'm really impressed by Celestia, in fact, i find it addictive but that's just me

anyway, I just wanted to know, if the program can ( in some way, not the real thing ) recreate the comet impact on Jupiter in '94 Schumacher-Levy 9 ?

i haven't tried it yet, since i'm not home now, and maybe my question is useless. But I just wanted to know.

Thanks in advance

Hi,

well, that kinda depends on how far you'd like to go. If you'd like to have gravity work, that's possible right now. You just have to go to bruckners and down the patch.

However, this currently seems to be limited on spaceships. So you'd had to mimmick you asteroids with spaceships which isn't so cool. But I'm sure they'll extend the patch to all sub planetary objects in the future.

If you wan't impressive impacts then there's lots and lots to do. You'd need dynamic textures for the impact marcs, a particle engine for some debris, dynamic explosion textures and dynamic lightning. Some extended scripting would also help.

So I fear this might be some miles aheady, I'm sorry.

Take care, Axel

There won't be any impressive collision effects for quite some time, but I do have some pretty nice looking comet tails that you'll see in version Celestia 1.2.5 (which will be ready 'soon' ) Getting a trajectory for the comet that actually intersects Jupiter might be somewhat challenging, however . . .

--Chris

Collisions, explosions and destructions wouldn't be a matter of just adding some particles and pretty lighting. There'd be the fact that you'd have to completely get rid of something from the Celestia universe (well, not permemently), meaning dynamic object removal and creation, the fact that you'd have to model debris, and of course the moral complications of sending a Earth-like planet hurtling into the sun...

The 'real' comet data for this collision must be out there somewhere. Shurely the same 'xyz' mechanism used for the voyager mission files would allow the correct trajectory to be plotted?

(hmm went off and searched a bit) turns out googling for 'sl9 orbital elements' gets you what you need. http://www.seds.org/sl9/sl9obs.html is a page with links to lots of info, and this page: http://www.seds.org/ftp/astro/SL9/info/elements.940711 has the elements. This page: http://www.seds.org/ftp/astro/SL9/info/ephem_off.940713 gives the ephemeris from which an xyz file could be generated.

As this is a collision of a some small objects into a very large object, you don't need to turn them off... you can hide them inside.

-Baz