arbitrary motion

[satai]

Hi there. I'm looking to use Celestia to view a generated data set of the early universe. I was wondering if there is any capacity in Celestia to have objects act under arbitrary motion -- for instance, to have a star move along a given path (preferably by a set of vectors -- as in, move here over the course of t seconds, then move here, etc) much like the camera path used in the demo.

However, if this is not available, is it because of a difficulty in adding it? Would adding arbitrary motion require a heavy rewrite? I'm not looking to do detailed gravitational simulations -- that's what the dataset results from; the goal would be to use the Celestia program as a visualization technique.

Thanks!

[JackHiggins]

You could use a set of xyz files to do this, but to produce them manually would be very time-consuming... xyz files contain 4 values on each line-

Code: Select all

Julian date     x coordinate in respect to solar ecliptic      y coord (same ref frame)      z coord (same ref frame)

Would this be useful for you?

[satai]

That would be perfect -- I don't intend to do the generation manually; I'll be writing an export program to get it from HDF5 format. I'll look through the documentation to find out more information on this -- thank you!