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Subject:
AutoMag
Date:
Thu, 26 Sep 2002 17:58:58 +0200
From:
Fridger Schrempp <t00fri@mail.desy.de>
To:
Clint Weisbrod <cweisbrod@adelphia.net>
CC:
Chris Laurel <claurel@shatters.net>
References:
1 , 2 , 3



Clint Weisbrod wrote:
>
> OK. I'm a bit confused. If you enable AutoMag while FOV is 45 degrees
> (normal viewing), shouldn't the magnitude be 6.0? On my version, the
> magnitude is set to 10.5 when FOV is 45 degrees.
>
> Sorry if I'm way off here.
>
> Clint.

The naked eye is able to see a limiting mag of 7-7.5 m in /absolutely/ dark
environment that we are concerned with in Celestia (outside of planetary
atmospheres). The naked eye FOV is O(100deg). Indeed, Automag reduces to
7.7m
limiting mag at the maximum fov of 120 deg. Notably with the new beautiful 2M
star data, we would loose those amazing clouds of real faint stars e.g within
the milky way if at 45deg we cut at 6.0m. My design criterion was furthermore
to tune the profile such that over a considerable range of available
magnitudes, the /density/ of stars remains /constant/ over a large range of
fov's. All these considerations lead to something like 10.5m at 45deg fov. In
the future one might think of setting this number from within a config file
according to personal taste.

Bye Fridger

[selden]

I'd argue that the AutoMag default value should be lower than its current setting because Celestia as a window in the middle of our larger personal FOV. It is not as if our entire 120 or so were being compressed into that 45 degrees (although often it does seem that way when our attention is focused on the screen).

An adjustable limiting magnitude is desirable, too, if only so those of us with slower CPUs can keep the frame rate up!