Time is a spiral vortex

[mstshtml]

Now when you mean, "to be displayed" do you mean in the future or an add-on you can download?
-sTeve

[t00fri]

Now when you mean, "to be displayed" do you mean in the future or an add-on you can download?
-sTeve

I am not working on add-ons, but on the main Celestia distribution. But there will certainly be "previews" for download.

Bye Fridger

[gigi57]

Hello,

I want to begin by saying I have always had a dream of a place where I could virtually fly through the universe. I never knew Celestia existed until today. It is absolutely amazing! Thank you all so much for your hard work.

I have spent hours (in my own work) trying to figure out why a code doesn't work only to realize it is a ridiculous syntax error due to a typo, so when I see a project like this I understand the enormous amount of effort and dedication that goes into it. Thanks!

I also want to say that I am no scientist, physicist, programmer or the like. I'm just a thinker and a dreamer!

I ran across this discussion poking around in the forums and I wanted to share a cool little tool that I found a few months ago on the National Gallery of Art Page.

http://www.nga.gov/kids/zone/mobile.htm

It allows you to create a mobile in shockwave and set the orbit speed etc. and then let it go and watch the "trails" the orbit paths make. I spent hours just playing with it for no other reason other than it was fascinating.

It occurred to me while playing with it, that it would be interesting to see the patterns created by the orbit trails of planets, stars or galaxies. Because, I just think about stuff like that.

I wondered, what kinds of mysteries of the astronomical world might be affected by these patterns? Maybe the "trails" carry tiny particles of xyz that affect all that come in their path.

Wouldn't it be amazing if the trail patterns of a star were identical to the wave length pattern of a Mozart Sonata or the motion of a distant galaxy resembled the pattern of a seed cluster in an apple or perhaps some trace particle from Jupiter effects the sun in "Solar Max" every 11 years.

It's a beautiful universe. Wouldn't be interesting just to see it move?


Thanks again for all your hard work and have fun playing with the mobile above.

Sincerely,
Gigi

[Sirius]

Short idea for Sensible Improvement of Interface:

- Set center of orbit display

As I understand the orbits could simply be resampled (using the relative position to the reference object/position) and centered on the reference. (Additionally, the orbit of the central Star would have to be drawn)

This would provide interesting results, also for those people who want to study geocentric celestial mechanics. Should not be too complicated to implement.

Sirius

P.S.: @gigi57: this should provide some nice pictures, too.

[Omega_Parsec]

you're all wrong !

That's our real universe !



[/img]

That's cool. But I think it's the picture (sorry don't have one) that has the turtle as a base for the earth with 4 elephants holding the globe on their shoulders. THAT is the true model of the universe.

[buggs_moran]

Galactic rotation and radial/translational stellar movement are known for many stars, but movements would be difficult to implement now in Celestia. Even the Hipparcos data has a certain amount of error so many of the star motions would be conjecture, starting with distance. I believe the sun itself has an oscillation through the plane of the galaxy every 30 million years and travels around every 250 million years (right?). If we don't have that motion figured out, how could we possibly do it for all of the other stars in the Hipparcos catalog. Temporarily, we might be able to show some local stellar movement, perhaps with a different stellar addon database consisting of a few hundred (or thousand) stars with motion variables added in (just set the motion variables to 0 in other databases). This way, motion of the constellations would be visible, but you still have to contend with galactic rotation. Celestia is fantastic, I love it, my students love it, no doubt, but until our data is more sound, what you would see, is not necessarily how it was, or will be.