Celestia Forums

Welcome to Project InterStellar!

The goal is to make/create every star known (inside Celestia's render limit).
Only "real" stars are allowed, no fictional stars.
Everyone may contribute to this HUGE project!
It is also allowed to put links/URLs to other star addons, that alredy have been made by other people, in this project.
Creating exoplanets around these stars is also OK, but the main goal is just the stars.

Allowed:
- Stars
- Star clusters (open and globulars), BUT as .stc, not .dsc!
- Stars in other galaxies
- URLs to other star addons


Allowed, but optional:
- Exoplanets
- Nebulae
- Protoplanetary disks

Disallowed:
- Galaxies
- Spacecraft
- Fictional things
- All other things I didn't list in "Allowed" and "Optional"

Added after 11 minutes 49 seconds:
Celestia.mobi - stars

Just to note, it's not possible for Celestia to render all billion-plus stars with known positions and distances.

(I mean all stars inside Celestia's render limit)

I'm not talking about the render limit. It's literally not possible for Celestia to load with that many stars. It's been tried with a generated stars.dat.

8 GB of RAM (my PC) should (theoretically) be enough for 8 GB heavy .stc files.
My extras folder is 8.86 GB in size and loads without any issue (except loading time: ~1 minute, but that's ok).

when celestia tries to load way too many stars it runs into what is called a buffer overflow issue
there is a max number of stars that a 32 bit program can load

EarthMoon wrote:8 GB of RAM (my PC) should (theoretically) be enough for 8 GB heavy .stc files.

just because you have 8gb of ram, doesnt mean you can load an 8gb file into your ram. other programs are using that ram, including windows itself, and so you end up having less than 8gb of available space within your ram

I'm pretty sure the program would significantly slow down even if there was no overflow issue.

Split the star catalog in 100(000000) .stc files

...how would that do anything? it wouldnt decrease the total file size, and would just become a massive annoyance for the user

a major rewrite of the stellar octree is needed for something like this to occur. otherwise, celestia cant handle massive star databases at all. something like the defunct AstroDB project that was worked on a while back

TheLostProbe wrote:a major rewrite of the stellar octree is needed for something like this to occur. otherwise, celestia cant handle massive star databases at all. something like the defunct AstroDB project that was worked on a while back

It would also end up breaking at least some scripts. Interfaces like celestia::stars() are not really usable in a world with billions of stars. This script provided in the Celestia distribution would be unusably slow, and the operation "mark all stars of a given spectral type" wouldn't be a particularly reasonable thing to do anyway.

The ability to support billions of stars would be such a fundamental change to how Celestia operates (there's a lot of stuff that fundamentally assumes a Hipparcos-scale universe, not a Gaia-scale one) that it would almost certainly deserve calling the resultant application Celestia 2.0.

so there would have to be some optimizations made to marker rendering for this to become supported as well. though i think the marker rendering system should be optimized for reasons other than this project anyway, because scripts that mark a large number of objects such as z-dist.celx, Mark All Exoplanets.cel and Mark All Exoplanets (Unconfirmed).cel slows down my computer horrendously