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numberedmoons.ssc update

Posted: 11.09.2005, 01:04
by granthutchison
Just a note to avoid some potential confusion for those who update numberedmoons.ssc from the CVS tree.
I've updated this today with complete orbital elements for the Saturnian satellites S/2004 S1 - S/2004 S6, taken from Porco et al.'s paper in Science of 25 Feb 2005 (Vol 307, 1226-36). You can get it in the usual place on the CVS tree:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/celestia/celestia/extras/numberedmoons.ssc

I also maintain a little "completionist" file (poormoons.ssc) for those who want to have every planetary moon so far discovered, even those with poorly known orbital elements. This one is far too vague be part of the Celestia distribution, so it's kindly hosted by Selden, here:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/hutchison/poormoons.html

Inevitably, stuff in poormoons.ssc migrates into numberedmoons.ssc as time goes by, so I maintain the two files in strict synchrony. So if you're going to update numberedmoons.ssc and have a copy of poormoons.ssc, remember to update it as well, otherwise you'll end up with moons that appear in both files.
All of this is documented in the files themselves, but I know some people don't like to read documentation. :?

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Confused by the number of "moons" files? I can't help you with all the add-ons that are now out there, some of which are now quite out of date. But here's a summary of the ones that are actually a part of Celestia:

1) solarsys.ssc: as well as the planets, this file contains major moons and those with defined shape models, such as Phobos and Deimos. Comes with the package.

2) minormoons.ssc: started life as a depository for the additional named moons that didn't appear in solarsys.ssc. Comes with the package.

3) numberedmoons.ssc: started life as a depository for all the moons that were numbered but unnamed; the other reason for choosing that particular name was to ensure it loaded after minormoons.ssc.
Stupid name :( . It of course was overtaken by events, and the numbered moons started to acquire names. However, for reasons of backwards compatibility, we decided not to mess around renaming the file or shifting moons between files. So the name is no longer logical, but it works fine.

With these three, you have every moon with a well-defined orbit. All the updates happen to numberedmoons.ssc, so you can leave the rest alone for long periods of time without missing much.

And then there's:
poormoons.ssc, my own little file, maintained outside the Celestia distribution, for "completionists" only. Stuff does shift out of this file and into numberedmoons.ssc, as I've described, so you need to update it in tandem with numberedmoons.ssc.

If you have all four of these files, up-to-date, you'll have every known planetary moon without duplication.
Apart, of course, from any I haven't got around to adding yet. :wink:

Grant

Posted: 11.09.2005, 01:14
by BrainDead
Thank you very much for that explanation - and for the updated files
themselves - Mr. Hutchison.

Muchly appreciated.

Posted: 11.09.2005, 01:47
by ElChristou
Yes, many Tx for this.

Bye

Posted: 11.10.2005, 20:16
by revent
Thanks for the effort you put into keeping these up to date, but I do have a suggestion. Just to make it a little easier to keep things in sync, would it be too much trouble for you to include the version # somewhere in the header in each file?

Poormoons says it's not compatible with any version of numberedmoons before a certain date, but there's no way for me to look at my copy of numberedmoons and see how old it is.

Thanks.

Posted: 11.10.2005, 21:26
by granthutchison
revent wrote:Poormoons says it's not compatible with any version of numberedmoons before a certain date, but there's no way for me to look at my copy of numberedmoons and see how old it is.
That's certainly something I could do.
In the meantime, I'd suggest you just download the latest version of numberedmoons.ssc from the link provided on the poormoons.ssc webpage
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/celestia/celestia/extras/numberedmoons.ssc)
any time you update poormoons.ssc. It's a pretty small download, when compared to almost every other Celestia add-on.

Grant

Posted: 05.12.2005, 13:51
by granthutchison
I've now added the new IAU-approved names of the Uranian satellites to numberedmoons.ssc and poormoons.ssc. At revent's suggestion, I've also added the version number to the numberedmoons.ssc text, so that henceforth you can check which version you have.
Get the updated numberedmoons.ssc at:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/celestia/celestia/extras/numberedmoons.ssc?rev=1.23
and poormoons.ssc at:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/hutchison/poormoons.html
(with thanks, as ever, to Selden for hosting the file).

It appears that the IAU does have a sense of humour, since they've managed to find a Shakespearean character called Perdita, to give a name to the mislaid and recovered satellite 1986 U10.

Grant