Celestia Forums

Hi again. I am having trouble with comet tails. Although I've got the options box checked, none of the comets in the solarsys list of Celestia 1.2.5 pre7 are showing any tails using my new high powered video card. I've set Celestia to dates known to be near their closest passage to the sun, and no tails. I've tries Halley, Borrely and Ikeya-Zang. I've tried viewing the sky from near Earth, from space, from near the comet, etc. No luck. I've checked and unchecked and checked the comet tails box in options multiple times. No go!

What is the trick for displaying comet tails? Is there something I have to do in solarsys.ssc? Is there a specific date and position I could try?

Anxiously awaiting your replies. Thanks

Frank G

I have a 4200 and have never had any trouble seeing the comet tails.

One way to see them is just to go to a comet: select Halley from the Solar System Browser, click on the Center and GoTo buttons, and then back off about 50,000 km using the mouse. The comet tails are a bright blue glow extended away from the sun. When they're enabled, the comet tails are always visible. No special date is needed.

Maybe if you were to describe your system hardware and software someone would notice a difference that might explain your problem.

(I have a 256MB, 500MHz Pentium 3 running Windows XP Pro SP1 with Nvidia's Detonator 40.72 drivers. Celestia's menu Help/OpenGL Info says
Renderer: GeForce4 Ti 4200/AGP/SSE
Version: 1.4.0
Max simultaneous textures: 4
Max texture size: 4096 )

I hope this helps a little.

I've just discovered that somehow, the phrase "class "comet" was missing from my comets in the solarsys.ssc file. Celestia did not know they were comets. When I added the phrase back, the comet tails appeared.

Thanks for your help. I really appreciate your willingness to help folks in the forum page.

Regards,

Frank G

Frank,

You're quite welcome. I glad you found the cause.

I've found it useful to keep around a copy of the Celestia directory tree that contains only the original unmodified files. That makes it easier to figure out if a problem is with Celestia or with something I've added or changed.

Wow Im glad you found the problem
because im off to buy myself an MSI or Creative Gforce4 Ti 4600
at the weakend.

Phew