Celestia Forums

with our human eyes we see a very limited view of the universe. this actually came to me in a dream but would make an excellemt add on for celestia. human eyes see somehting around 400-700nm wavelenght of light. using 4 buttons to alter this range of sight. two buttons to increase/decrease the upper range and 2 buttons to inc/dec the lower part of the range. Of course the colors of xray gamma, infra , and xray are incomprehensible to us but as you enter a certain range the (lets say xrray light) starts to become visible using a certain or certain colors to represent it. what does everyone think of this. the question is especially for the developers.[code][/code]

And where to get the data from?

maxim

There are lots of sun, nebulas, galaxies (and also one of the moon) images in X-ray, Gamma UltraViolet and InfraRed in the internet, maybe we can start from those things...

If only Celestia supported AltTextures for Nebula objects, it'd be trivial...

This does sound like a fun, and educational, idea.

Since there are multiple wavelength data available on the Internet, false color of course, I think it would be great to be able to alter a "wavelength" setting (Visible Light, Infrared, X-ray, Gamma, etc.) in Celestia to actually view this data -- on objects where it is actually available.

-Don G.

What I would really like to see (thought it's impossible to realize) is what chrisr explained about a continuous spectrum. Something like 64-128bit depth images which contain several channels that are linear (logarithmic?) combined. So you can take your 'visible light window' and slide it along the spectral space, shifting colors versus IR or UV.

maxim

Based on celestia's current architecture i was thinking such effects could only easily be handled for stars. I would be amazing to see the huge amounts of uv of the corona by switching to uv light. A sort irredescent glow around it.

sorry, this is chrisr not logged in

i was alsot thinking (responding to selden's comment) that this whole thing wouldn't involve diffent textures. Could it not be done with code to describe the colors representing the different ranges and then overlaying these effects on the stars. of course certain effects would be more etheral around the star, but wow it would be amazing

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The details of how stellar luminosity varies with wavelength are relatively subtle. They depend on more than just the star's spectral type. Currently, however, the spectral type and absolute luminosity is just about all the information that Celestia has to go on. It does seem to me, though, that modifying the stars' colors and relative luminosities, depending on a "displayed wavelength" control ought to be reasonable -- no worse than the guess at their rotational speeds, it seems to me.

Maybe Grant could make some more quantitative comments.

Of course, actually implementing such a display control is another matter entirely...

And, of course, I want very much to be able to do something similar for Nebulas, which is why I mentioned associating such a control with AltSurface textures. The bandwidths used to image nebulas are fairly well standardized, especially if you use images from a particular survey like 2MASS.

sorry bout that selden. well yeah i figured someihing tlike this would be a huge undertakning. (celestia v3.0?) i imagine it would require volumetric particle effect stuff. which would change celestia entirely once developed. imagine the nebulas, imagine what could be done with planetary ring systems. o the posssiblities.

maxim wrote:And where to get the data from?

maxim

Aladin is my favourite tool. If you don't know it, it's well worth a look:
http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr
With Aladin you can look at a patch of sky at almost any wavelength, overlay views, apply colour maps, and more. It's way cool .

Adam