Beginning and ending dates

[buggs_moran]

I was working on my Mira (variable star) & companion w/ accretion disk tonight and had a mini brainstorm. What if you could port/parse variable star data in from the AAVSO tables with historical dates and magnitudes into an stc file. Oh great idea, until I came to the question

"Can stc files contain beginning and ending dates?"

I haven't had any luck getting it to work...

As a side note, for future versions of Celestia. How difficult would it be to put a period of variability and range of magnitudes or rather spectral type into the program. For instance.


Barycenter "MiraAB"
{
RA 2.32241 # 2:19:20.7 (h:m:s)
Dec -2.9775 # -2:58:39 (deg:m:s)
Distance 418
}

1 "MiraAB A" # component Omicron Ceti HD 14386
{
OrbitBarycenter "MiraAB"
SpectralType "M7IIIe"
AbsMag 1.1 #actual variation -2.5 to 4.7

VariabilityStart "1605 01 01 12:00:00 AM"
VariabilityPeriod 331.96 #in days
VariabilityAbsMagLow 4.7
VariabilityAbsMagHi -2.5

Radius 480e6
SemiAxes [1 0.85 1]

EllipticalOrbit {
Period 1e10
SemiMajorAxis 1e-9

}
}

[selden]

"Can stc files contain beginning and ending dates?"

Not at this time.