Celestia Forums

Hello,

Here is a ssc file which brings 227 additionnal comets to Celestia.

The data come from the IAU Minor Planet Center
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net

The limited goal of this file is to provide the position of each comet.
I have no information about the size or the rotation of each comet.
So the size is arbitrarily fixed at a radius of 5 km and no rotation occurs.


The image above shows a view of the solar system whith the comets magnified with the magnification tool of the Lua Plugins.

You can see and reach all the comets but apparently a bug in Celestia prevents to view the labels and the orbits of the comets with hyperbolic orbits.

As the data source is updated on a daily basis, it is interesting to updade the ssc from time to time.

The attached file containt the ssc file + a perl script to rebuild the ssc file from the source file that you can find here:
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/Ep ... t00Cmt.txt

The source file must be downloaded in the same directory an renamed as "comets.txt"

Hi Jo?l: how do you feel with Perl? At least sleep and goto works there; in LUA are a pain...

Hi,

Fenerit wrote:Hi Jo?l: how do you feel with Perl?

I don't like it too much but it is sometime useful.


By the way, I have attache to this post a second version of the script.

I found another file with plenty of comets here.
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catal ... don_id=646
the file is "DIRL_comets_v3.02.ssc" and contains 161 comets.

This version of the script allows to make a new ssc file with the data from the Minor Planet Center site without creating dupicates with the other files already in use.

If a comet already exists, if makes an entry with "Modify" and the existing name to update only the orbit elements of the comet.
This preserves the other elements as the radius, the texture, the model etc. of the existing comets.

But the "Modify" directive works only if the new "morecomets.ssc" is loaded after the other ssc files containing comets.
To solve this issue, my solution is to put the other ssc comets files in the celestia/data directory and to active them by writing these file in the SolarSystemCatalogs section of the celestia.cfg file.

The perl script, the source file "comets.txt" and the resulting "morecomets.ssc" file must reside in a subdirectory of the "extras" directory (e.g. celestia/extras/morecomets )

The script takes care not to make NEW duplicates in the "morecomets.ssc" file. If there is duplicates among the other ssc file they will remain and only one will be updated.

At this time, the sript is designed to test the files
- comets.ssc
- DIRL_comets_v3.02.ssc
(these files must be in the celestia/data directory)

If you have other comets ssc files you can add the files at the beginning of the Perl script.
If the naming is different you may also have to add some code to it.

Hi,

I realize that there were another thread that I had totally forgotten here
COMETS (ssc from MPEC updates)

I stop here this thread and join the existing one for further developments.
I have removed the attachments of the previous posts which are now out of date.