Alternative Constellations for Celestia

[Marco Klunder]

Hello all,

After doing some alternative Constellation implementations for Celestia in october/november last year, I worked in the past 2 months on the additional implementation of the Chinese Constellations and Indigenous Brazilian Constallations and added them to the "Alternative Constellations and Asterisms" add-on, which is now released on the Motherlode and can be downloaded from: http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_addon_details.php?addon_id=1524.

This Celestia Add-on contains the original and some alternative Constellations and Asterisms.
The Constellations are organized in different series and can be recognized by their series number added to the Constellation name, just to keep them apart from each other within the same file:
#1 Western (Wiki);
#2 Francais (Wiki);
#3 Polski (Wiki);
#4 Chandra;
#7 Chinese (Wiki and Activities of Exhibition and Education in Astronomy).
#8 Indigenous Brazilian Constellations.
Besides these series of Constellations, creative individual Constellations are also added and can be recognized by their series number #5 or #6 added to the Constellation name. There also are some recognizable Asterisms implemented by their own unique name.

The implemented Constellations are all documented with pictures, text files and references that accompany this add-on.

Because Celestia draws all defined Constellations and Asterisms in the 'asterisms.dat' file through each other, this Celestia Add-on also contains some CELX scripts, that can be used to individually show and/or clear specific (series of) Constellations and Asterisms.

Possibly in the near future there will be some enhancements to Celestia, to better organize series of Constellations, by keeping their original names, without #number extensions, but organize them by family/serie. Until then I suggest this implementation to further on develop this Add-on!

That also brings me to the next question to you readers and Celestia fans:
Can anyone help me to obtain further valuable documentation, downloads, websites, etc. for the implementation of other series of Constellations. Especially alternative cultures are very welcome at this stage (like the last Chinese and Indigenous Brazilian Constellations).
A bit of decoding pictures or documents must be possible of course to realize a valuable Celestia implementation. I think it should be nice, if we can implement multiple star pattern cultures in Celestia from here, so feel free to react on this thread to deliver that information, or mail me at: [url]marco.klunder@hccnet.nl[/url].

I hope you will enjoy this Add-on.

Marco

[Marco Klunder]

A re-visit to this "old" thread.

Meanwhile I improved this add-on with the following:
* Sami Constellations added
* Norse Constellations added
* Interantional Astronomical Union (IAU) Constellations added
* Hawaiian Starlines added
* Plug-in for Lua_Edu_Tools and/or Lua_plugins, to switch between Constellation cultures using a GUI interface.

Asterisms_2013.JPG

The formal release of this addon can now be downloaded from:
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_addon_details.php?addon_id=1524

Regarding internationalization:
The new GUI for this addon under Lua_Edu_Tools or Lua_Plugins is ready for internationalization.
Currently I implemented the English, Dutch, Italian, French and German languages.
I must admit, for this addon I only did it with my own (limited) knowledge of all these languages.
So I hereby invite the international professionals to validate these language implementations and give me feed-back, so I can correct things if needed.

Of course I also invite people in other countries/languages to give me their input for other language support.
(See my email address below).


Unfortunately, the implementation of Asterisms in Celestia has another standard regarding internationalization, than used for Lua plugins.
This is done by PO files.
This in combination with the limited possibilities to differentiate more sky cultures in Celestia (the way I did it now is by adding numbers to the Constellation names), was the biggest reason to NOT go further in Internationalization for this Addon regarding the Constellation names.
So when presented in Celestia, all constellation names are in default English.

Marco