Celestia Forums

Paul Baulch contributed a list of hundreds of galaxies and globular clusters for use with Celestia v1.2. He gave me permission to update that file for use with Celestia v1.3. (He currently does not have Internet access from home.)

globular_clusters.dsc
galaxies_extended.dsc
galaxy_clusters.dsc

are now available at
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/catalogs.html#3.7.2

you dont need to delete any files for these to work, right?

Mike,

That's correct. The galaxies defined in the Celestia distribution kit are not included in any of these files.

v1.3's DSC files just add more objects, just like SSC files. This is one reason why Chris eliminated the "galaxies.dat" file. Even if they have the same names and/or locations as other objects, Celestia will happily draw them all. Of course, this may cause some visual confusion for the watcher when there are duplicates, but this can be useful for object designers.

Celestia looks in the /extras/ folder for DSC files. Also, starting with v1.2.5, you can tell Celestia to look in additional "extras" directories by modifying celestia.cfg. Read the .cfg file for details: it's pretty straight forward.

This addon is very promising. I guess we'll soon be able to see galaxies, but galaxies' crowds too (I don't know if it's the right words in english for the "big and numerous galaxies"), wich could be another step ahead for this great program.

But I saw after installing these files some blue galaxies (the far away ones) and some grey galaxies. Click this link to see if the same phenomenon is seen too on your computer :
cel url

Psykotik,

They've been discussing the "colored galaxies" bug in another thread.
See http://63.224.48.65/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1913

Apparently it depends on other add-ons being present at the same time. I don't see it at all.

Yep, just seen it.

Thanks.

Thanks Selden - I wish I had the time to do this myself.

And nice work with the comments too!

Paul,

You're quite welcome.
Now I just have to persuade myself to stop "polishing the apple"
(I just put them into a zip and created an alternate catalog with the globulars all named ".")

One question: what catalog did you use to get the list of globular clusters?
I'd like to add a mention of it.

One question: what catalog did you use to get the list of globular clusters?
I'd like to add a mention of it.

Sure, no problem. The catalogue was "Globular Clusters in the Milky Way" (Harris, 1996). However, checking with VizieR shows that this catalog has been updated:
http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=VII/202

Good point, I should have mentioned source catalogues in the comments. Then again, there were substantial modifications and additions from other catalogues. The galaxy catalogue was heavily modified by (apart from my own tweaking) additions from the NED and the SEDS NGC/IC database:

http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/forms/byname.html
http://www.seds.org/~spider/ngc/ngc.html

Better start polishing that apple...

Hello!

I've downloaded galaxies_extended.dsc and noticed that you've forgotten the keyword "galaxy" on line 5081 ("IC 3365") - what prevents celestia from loading a bit less than a half of the huge galaxy list

peace!

richard

Richard,

Thanks!

It's fixed now.

For those who care about such things...

I've updated globular_clusters.dsc to include InfoURLs linking to the Simbad database.

The galaxies catalogs have not yet been updated.

I've updated the galaxy dsc files to include InfoURLs, too.
Also, there are now "dots" versions of the catalogs which substitute individual characters for the galaxies' names in order to make it easier to look at their overall distributions, just as had been done for star clusters previously.

See http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/catalogs.html for details.