Celestia Forums

Is there a way that you could make the eclipse finder able to find eclipses on any body that has a big enough sattelite? perhaps you could make relative to the solar system that you are closest to, like the solar system browser.

I read somewhere on the forum that the code for eclipse finding is general and the GUI is the solar system central part.

Brendan wrote:I read somewhere on the forum that the code for eclipse finding is general and the GUI is the solar system central part.

Yes, that's correct: the GUI needs to be redesigned to be more general. Even within our solar system, there's still no option to check for eclipse events between different moons.

If anyone has ideas for how a more flexible eclipse finder would look and work, please share them.

--Chris

chris wrote:If anyone has ideas for how a more flexible eclipse finder would look and work, please share them...

What about:

- a field to choose a body
- a menu to chose on which object the eclipse is casted*
- a time of beginning
- a period of time (or several pre determined laps of time kind a week, a month, a year etc...) (this to avoid too long calculations because after all, do we need to search on very long time period?)

*that means Celestia must calculate the possibilities of eclipses...

ElChristou wrote:

chris wrote:If anyone has ideas for how a more flexible eclipse finder would look and work, please share them...

What about:

- a field to choose a body
- a menu to chose on which object the eclipse is casted*

Ideally, you want to be able to check for eclipses against multiple objects at the same time. For instance, I want to search for any eclipse between the Galilean satellites over a specified time range.

- a time of beginning
- a period of time (or several pre determined laps of time kind a week, a month, a year etc...) (this to avoid too long calculations because after all, do we need to search on very long time period?)

I think that users should be allowed to choose however long a time period they like. A dialog box with a progress bar and a stop button would permit interruption of overly long calculations. Additionally, eclipses could be added to the list as soon as they are found, so users don't have to wait until the calculation is complete to see the some results.

--Chris

there also could be a "set date and go to surface" button,

and I think that the search feature should be compatable with the mouse, so that you can select objects in it by clicking on them.

But that's a bit off-topic.