Celestia Forums

Hi,
I found some problems when I land upon a object (with Ctrl-G): if the object is spherical you will see the landscape, the horizon and (as you know) you can move your point of view eastwards, westwards, up and down, simply pressing the arrow keys.
But sometimes it happens that you cannot see any "ground" at all, but only stars: even if you press the up arrow in order to make the complete 360 degrees revolution you cannot see any landscape but only stars, even if the object is perfectly spherical. At the moment (I'm at work) I have no example to tell, but if someone wants to have a try, I'll certainly find a place for which this problem appears.

Another problem rises when the object you are on has a strange shape: yesterday I travelled to "Ida" (a bone-shaped asteroid) and when I landed onto it with Ctrl-G (and then Ctrl-F to enter Altazimuth mode), there were problems when trying to change my point of view with left-right arrows: if you try it, you can see that sometimes the horizon disappears at all.
Sorry, but it's difficult to describe it: I suggest to try again with other odd-shaped objects, like "Amalthea", "Deimos" and so on. Travel to them, land on them, switch to altazimuth mode and try to "look around" with left-right arrows.

BTW if you land upon "Dactyl" (the satellite of "Ida" asteroid) you can witness the spectacular sight of the very near asteroid!
Like our moon, Dactyl shows the same face as seen from Ida and, viceversa, landing on it, you can see Ida, fixed in the sky, but changing its phase and illumination in a very uncommon way!! Have a try on it! It's awesome!

I get the problem with the dissapearing ground too... I just hold down "End" for a bit, to increase my altitude to a few 100m (on earth) and it shows up fine then. I think it *might* have something to do with oblate, rather than perfectly spherical planets...?

With 3ds objects, it's just that you're going "inside" the 3ds mesh. It's only visible from the outside, so once you go inside the object it's completely invisible. The only way to solve this would be to have the altitude read differently, depending on your distance from the surface, not from your distance to the center of rotation.

The Dactyl lunar landing looks really cool... Another fun thing to do is land on dactyl, turn up the limiting magnitude up full, set the time back to 1993, and try & spot galileo fly past!! (Warning: may require small FOV... )

With the planets happens the same: you dont see the ground because you are inside the planet OR very very very near the surface.