Celestia Forums

Is it possible that an asteroid belt can be added into the Cetestia, it can make the solar system look more realistic.

It should be possible to add asteroids orbiting where the belt is but how many asteroids would Celestia support? I'm sure its possible. It would probably have to be done on the fly in the program rather than be a real belt of millions of rocks orbiting in space. I wonder if the same could be achieved for the rings around planets? Use the current rings for far away but render small rocks as you get close and pass through the rings.

AJ wrote:Is it possible that an asteroid belt can be added into the Cetestia, it can make the solar system look more realistic.

Celestia already has a few asteroids in its database; they tend to be among the ones whose shapes are known from radar, telescope, or spacecraft observations. There's an add-on at Bruckner's site

http://bruckner.homelinux.net/addons.html

that has some data for all of the largest known asteroids (though not realistic shape models since their shapes are mostly unknown). Many more could be added if someone put in the work; there are many thousands of asteroids with known orbital elements.

Keep in mind, though, that the real asteroid belt is nothing like an Empire Strikes Back-style "asteroid field" with tumbling rocks smashing together all the time. Though there are millions of asteroids, the space they occupy is so big that they're not very close together. If you were in the thickest part of the main asteroid belt, you wouldn't see anything unusual-- just, perhaps, a few extra dim lights in the sky.

Matt McIrvin wrote:

AJ wrote:Is it possible that an asteroid belt can be added into the Cetestia, it can make the solar system look more realistic.

Keep in mind, though, that the real asteroid belt is nothing like an Empire Strikes Back-style "asteroid field" with tumbling rocks smashing together all the time. Though there are millions of asteroids, the space they occupy is so big that they're not very close together. If you were in the thickest part of the main asteroid belt, you wouldn't see anything unusual-- just, perhaps, a few extra dim lights in the sky.

Exactly. In fact, a collision only happens every few thousand years in the asteroid belt.

Oh yeah, doesn't anyone know about the URL tag?

http://bruckner.homelinux.net/addons.html is the add-on site. Just for you lazy bums who don't like typing stuff.