Celestia Forums

Ok, I've seen many suggestions on this board for some many (difficult to impliment) improvements to Celestia, which we will undoubtedly have to wait for. I have a few that I'd like to suggest which hopefully are not nearly as grandiose.

1) Greater Color pallets for the stars. a star of a late K type (K8) has much more in common with a star of early M (M0) than say a star of say type (K2). I suggest a scale that would deal with colors something like this:
M9 to M0 moving from Deep Red to Orange-Red
K9 to K0 moving from Orange-Red to Orange-Yellow
G9 to G0 moving from Orange-Yellow to Yellow-White
F9 to F0 moving from Yellow-White to White
A9 to A0 moving from White to Blue-White
B9 to B0 (and beyond) moving from Blue-White onward, at this point the blue coloration can remain the same I figure.

2) Color variations for white dwarf stars, at this point putting in a star being spectral type "DA2" results in Celestia simply placing it at an arbitrary class of "wd" and setting its surface to 10,000 K. White dwarfs come in all colors and sizes so Celestia should reflect this.

3) In the absense of a better way to define Radius/Diameter for stars, I'd request an option that allows the User to define the Radius, this way when the Radius is known and Celestia gets it wrong someone can input it manually.

4) Replace, if possible, the HIP numbering system with some kind of internal catalogue that does not have to be visible when the star name is reported. I personally don't mind creating fake HIP numbers for stars that aren't on the Hipparcos catalogue but it would be more realistic to have some system handle the numbering internally and then have the star names be more flexable.

Well thats all for now, enjoy.

I think 1 has already been suggested, or something really close to it, and as for 4, the stars with HIP nimbers are from the Hippacrose (check spelling on that) Star Catalouge. I don't think most of those stars have any other name.

billybob884 wrote:I think 1 has already been suggested, or something really close to it, and as for 4, the stars with HIP nimbers are from the Hippacrose (check spelling on that) Star Catalouge. I don't think most of those stars have any other name.

Most (all?) of those stars certainly do have other names. Searching the Hipparcos catalogue shows that of 118,218 stars, 288 (less than 0.25%) have no Durchmusterung number, either Cordoba, Cape or Bonn - the vast majority do. There are plenty of other identification/survey codes floating around (not referred to so conveniently in the Hipparcos catalogue entries as the DM numbers), so I doubt that the remaining 288 have only a Hipparcos number, especially since Hipparcos must have looked at stars with known positions in the first place; known and recorded in other catalogues.

But the problem remains whatever the status of the HIP numbers. They are just numbers for one survey. More stars don't have them than do, and the list of HIP numbers is not going to be extended officially (the mission's over). I think that the suggestion of having an internal numbering system is a good one, because the identifiers will be simple numbers and will also be guaranteed unique; have each star record contain the more important/desirable catalogue designations.