Celestia Forums

I strongly suggest to change the moons orbital path color to something else than blue. At close range from some planet, people (all my students, and myself) tends to confuse planets and moons orbits. Why not use a purple or a blue-green color ? This would also be more coherent with the fact that most object classes are using a different color for their orbital path (planets, spacecraft, asteroids, etc).

Chris ?

Sure . . . it's easy to change. Anyone else have an opinion on color choice for moon orbits?

--Chris

I suggest to use a variation of the blue used for the planets. Moons orbits should not (IMHO) be too constrasted compared to the planet's orbit. What we currently have are these (including labels) :

- Planets : Blue orbits and green labels
- Moon : Blue orbits and green labels
- Spacecraft : light gray orbits and light gray labels
- Asteroids : orange orbits and orange labels
- Comets : light blue-green (cyan ?) orbits and labels
- Galaxies and deep space objects : light blue-green labels (same color as for the comets).

As stated in my first post above, I suggest a purple orbital path for the moons, or maybe magenta ? Green labels are okay with me, but it may be more coherent to use another color for them too (same color as for the orbits ?). Any other opinions ?

Going on an rgb colour scale here:

Planet orbits seem to be r0 g102 b255.
Asteroid orbits seem to be r89 g51 b0.
Comet orbits seem to be r0 g128 b128.

If we're talking about orbit colours we might as well go over all of them, like Cham said. Remember the stars need to be added too, right? So we need a colour for those.

I was thinking that star orbits could be pale yellow (and yellow labels)? The sort that's r255 g255 b128 or thereabouts?

Not sure about a purple colour for moons though... pale violet might work maybe? r255 b160 b255?

I'm thinking maybe if we could swap out the turquoise comet colours and use those for the moons instead that might work - I think it's a good colour to use, and it's used so rarely given comets are rare addons. Would we then be able to use perhaps a more ice-blue/white for the comets? Paler than that of the planet orbits, like maybe r140 g185 b255?

Just throwing out ideas here.

While we are at it; requesting additional classes for orbit objects.
Simply creating and defining new object classes to be used in Celesita. We can all decide on what the new class and/or coloring schema should be used. I think for the most part for additional classes will work.

Existing
"planet"
"asteroid"
"moon"
"comet"
"spacecraft"
"invisible"

New Classes
"dwarf_planet"
smaller then normal planets, but to large to be classified as an asteroid or KBO
"star"
nuff said
"barycenter"
special orbit color to distinguish between a stars orbit and a barycenter orbit. (would only be use is ternary or greater systems)
"kepler"
Kepler Belt Object.

Most of them should make sense or at least they do to me.

Better yet, why not make all orbits and labels colors user definable?

@Chris

Just wondering if you read the idea and are considering implementing any new class and or user definable colors?

Thanks

-Matt-

I've been reading this thread . . . I do want to make colors user definable, but I don't think I'll do it right away. The reason is that I want to add user definable object classes soon, and that will affect how label and orbit colors are set. For 1.5.0, I'll just change the color of the moon orbits and be done with it (I'm experimenting with violet right now.)

--Chris