Celestia Forums

I've seen several posts about irregular objects and searched for other related topics. My apologies if this has been brought up before...

I was just screwing around and added the following .ssc file which adds a "Europa type" moon orbiting the moon.

Add "moon2" "Sol/Earth/Moon" {
Texture "europa.*"
Radius 1500

EllipticalOrbit {
Period 10
SemiMajorAxis 8000
Eccentricity 0.200000
Inclination 5.15
}
}

I went to the October 27, 2004 lunar eclipse. Here's what I noted...
a.) The earth eclipses the moon but not "Europa"
b.) The moon eclipses "Europa" but not visa versa

Obviously this is not a "natural occurence" so I wasn't sure if this should be expected to work or not. (Using 1.3.2, FX5200, XPsp2). I tried all the render paths and also went into the celestia.cfg file and changed eclipsetextures (or whatever, can't remember the name) to 512 from the default of 128. (not even knowing what this does. )

Unfortunately, the current version of Celestia only casts shadows on and by spherical objects and rings. 3D models (specified by a Mesh definition) neither cast shadows nor have shadows cast onto them.

There is reason to hope that a more general shadow-casting capability will be in the next major release of Celestia. However, it may require OpenGL features that are not available for older cards.