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Recently a paper was posted to the arXiv detailing a database of W Ursae Majoris-type binaries: Latković et al. (2021). I decided to rewrite* my earlier W UMa binaries add-on to use this database.

Version 1.0.1 can be downloaded here.

After removing systems for which I could not get sufficient data, the add-on contains 403 systems. It was generated using the stars.dat and starnames.dat files from commit a0f213385d15138542d3033f4c0da05f51683e9a of the CelestiaContent repository (which is current at the time of writing), so for best results use those.

The add-on will use whatever spectral type textures you've configured in celestia.cfg.

More details, including instructions for generating your own W UMa meshes (e.g. for worldbuilding) is in the README of the repository.




* It was easier to rewrite it from scratch rather than figure out what my old uncommented Perl code was doing... there's probably a lesson here somewhere.

Note: the old version of this addon (from over a decade ago!) is archived here. The old addon thread is here.

SevenSpheres wrote:Note: the old version of this addon (from over a decade ago!) is archived here.

Did a bit of cleaning up of the scripts, in the process of which I re-downloaded the source data. This resulted in the addition of WZ Cygni to the output files, for a total of 404 systems.

Version 1.0.2 can be downloaded here.

FYI for those using Celestia Origin, each star in this addon has to have the mono texture in order to work on the meshes.
Default stars on Celestia Origin use VT textures which meshes don't support.
A-stars in this addon would say: Texture "star-a-mono.dds"
B-stars in this addon would say: Texture "star-b-mono.dds"
A-stars in this addon would say: Texture "star-c-mono.dds"
G-stars in this addon would say: Texture "star-g-mono.dds"
K-stars in this addon would say: Texture "star-k-mono.dds"
M-stars in this addon would say: Texture "star-m-mono.dds"

Now C, O, S, L, and T, class stars aren't mentioned there, so this's all I'll say about the textures for this addon to Celestia Origin users.
It's a pain in the butt for those not willing to take the time to texture each star onto the meshes with the mono textures, but it's the only method to solve the texture problem if you have Celestia Origin and are installing this addon.