Celestia Forums

Ok now that I've figured out how to deal with the errors in distance when dealing with adding binary companions to stars already in Celestia I've been going down Oppenheimer's Catalogue and I came upon a dim pair called Struve 2398, I discovered that this pair of stars was indeed in Celestia. The Coordinates are as follows:

Struve 2398 A: RA - 280.694542
Dec - 59.630389
Struve 2398 B: RA - 280.695417
Dec - 59.626833

Now the first thing is in Celestia these stars are known as HIP 91772 and HIP 91768 respectively, they are seperated by roughly 47.631 AU which is in agreement with the real life vaules for A & B. However, both stars hover around the M3 V range in temperature. In Celestia they are given as K5 V, this should be changed. The distance to the pair is on the mark however. Also since this is a relatively close and in the scheme of things bright pair of red dwarfs the name Struve 2398 ought to be given to them.

Well hope this helps development continue I'm going back to my "add on" work, cheers!

P.S. while looking at Kruger 60, I found out that the star called HIP 110923 was nearby when in fact it should not be. The Star HIP 110923 has a parallax of just 1.17 mas or .00117 seconds of an arc, this results in a distance of over 850 light years, rather than being just 900 AU from Kruger 60.

P.S.S. shouldn't there be something like a bug reporting tool so we could make reports for stellar errors?

P.S.S.S. It sure is early in the AM!

I've just commited a new version of starnames.dat to the Celestia CVS tree - it contains "common" catalogue names for all the stars within 25 ly of the Sun. This might help you to establish which stars are present in Celestia - though beware that your favourite names might not appear. Many tables don't mention Struve 2398, for instance, and give it as BD +59?1915 instead.
You can find the new version of starnames.dat at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/celestia/celestia/data/starnames.dat

Grant

From what I've heard the Wolf and Ross Catalogues aren't used all that often. I'm not really sure what constitutes a "common name" anyway, for instance Wolf 359 is known widely mainly due to the exploits of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Perhaps in that case the name is truly common, but otherwise I don't know. Lalande 21185, Lacaille 9352, Ross 248, if it weren't for their proximity to the sun they probably wouldn't be all that important to anyone. Hell I know alot of people who remember SN 1987A, but far fewer know what Sanduleak -69* 202 means.

Anyway its good to hear we're getting some more names, I've added and changed a few in my starnames file. I've also added 20 stars to my "add-on" I consider that a milestone so I'd like to put it up somewhere, though I'm still discovering just how add-ons are submitted. Anyway, thanks for the reply. Cheers.

From what I've heard the Wolf and Ross Catalogues aren't used all that often. I'm not really sure what constitutes a "common name" anyway, for instance Wolf 359 is known widely mainly due to the exploits of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Perhaps in that case the name is truly common, but otherwise I don't know. Lalande 21185, Lacaille 9352, Ross 248, if it weren't for their proximity to the sun they probably wouldn't be all that important to anyone. Hell I know alot of people who remember SN 1987A, but far fewer know what Sanduleak -69* 202 means.

Anyway its good to hear we're getting some more names, I've added and changed a few in my starnames file. I've also added 20 stars to my "add-on" I consider that a milestone so I'd like to put it up somewhere, though I'm still discovering just how add-ons are submitted. Anyway, thanks for the reply. Cheers.

Apollo7 wrote:I've also added 20 stars to my "add-on" I consider that a milestone so I'd like to put it up somewhere, though I'm still discovering just how add-ons are submitted.

Why don't you just post the text of your stc file here, together with the necessary text to be added to starnames.dat? Folk who're interested can then cut-and-paste into their own files.
Good news, though: the next version of Celestia will accept a list of names in the stc file itself, without requiring modification of starnames.dat.

Grant