How to add more stars (SAO, HD, TYC, etc.)

The place to discuss creating, porting and modifying Celestia's source code.
Topic author
CU1500
Posts: 2
Joined: 01.01.2018
With us: 6 years 8 months

How to add more stars (SAO, HD, TYC, etc.)

Post #1by CU1500 » 01.01.2018, 19:03

I am a new member of this forum and would like to know how to "add" or "create" a new catalog of stars to Celestial. Thanks :)

Avatar
LukeCEL
Posts: 373
Joined: 26.09.2017
With us: 6 years 11 months

Post #2by LukeCEL » 02.01.2018, 20:29

The Celestia Motherlode has a full catalog of TYC stars, which you can download here. Installation instructions are included.

Added after 12 minutes 14 seconds:
Note: The stars in the HD and SAO catalog are mostly contained in the TYC catalog. But, the add-on doesn't include cross-indices with all those new names, so if you you can't look up "HD 2", only "TYC 3660-43-1".

Avatar
selden
Developer
Posts: 10190
Joined: 04.09.2002
With us: 22 years
Location: NY, USA

Post #3by selden » 02.01.2018, 20:44

CU1500,

Stars can be added to Celestia using plain-text files called "STar Catalogs". They have a .STC "file type". Examples are in Celestia's data directory. A detailed description of the format is in the Celestia Wikibook at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia/STC_File

Very large STC files can take a while to load, so if you want to add more than a few thousand stars, you'll need to learn how to create a replacement binary catalog "stars.dat". At the moment, the best documentation is in the buildstardb.pl Perl script used to create it from Hipparcos catalog. See https://sourceforge.net/p/celestia/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/celestia/src/tools/stardb/
Selden


Return to “Development”