Hi All,
First off, I have to say, Celestia is awesome. I run it almost every day.
Like many others, I have a desire to see a more complete variety of galactic objects like nebulae, black holes and the like. One thing I thought might be acceptably customised in the current Celestia program was globular clusters. Basically I treated them as miniature galaxies and added them to galaxies.dat (well, around thirty of the nearest ones, anyway). I also added several more external galaxies such as Centaurus A, M87 in Virgo, and the Silver Coin Galaxy NGC253. Here's my modified galaxies file if anyone's interested:
http://www.geocities.com/doctorshnub/galaxies.txt
Obviously it'd be a lot nicer for globulars to resolve into stars, but then that's also true of galaxies... and besides, I'm not sure the speculative nature of what stars constitute a particular globular, goes with the philosophy behind Celestia's core content...
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. This also fixes a small error in the original galaxies.dat where M81(NGC3031) is mistakenly labelled M82.
P.P.S. I obtained the relevant data from the most excellent astronomical search engine VizieR ( http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR ). Queries can be returned in an Excel-friendly format, which makes data editing a breeze - it's only a shame Celestia's text data files aren't so spreadsheet friendly... ( )
Globular Clusters
Globular Clusters
Paul wrote:and besides, I'm not sure the speculative nature of what stars constitute a particular globular, goes with the philosophy behind Celestia's core content...
Well, if globulars would resolve into yellow stars it wouldn't be too far off the mark, as globulars usually consist of old stars.
bye
[L]