Celestia Forums

My friends, I have seen through the list that there are various interests on Celestia, but mainly three: the people who are interested in producing other worlds astronomy scenarios, based on scientific knowledge, the people who prefer the Sci-Fi scenarios (Star Wars, Star-Trek, etc.) and finally the people who love software improvement, including textures.
I belong to a fourth category, that is little present on the list, or is almost invisible, i.e. the people interested on Celestia Astronomy training capabilities.

I think that Celestia could be used in a very advantageous way for such a purpose, both in Schools and Museums, and following my opinion on the matter I have done what follows:

in our Observatory (157 Frasso Sabino, in Italy, close to Rome) we are organizing an Astronomy Museum, mainly devoted to school boys and to adults who have interest on astronomy.
We have organized a touch-screen monitor, with 6 big icons on the desktop, named:

- The Solar System
- The Earth
- Mars
- The Minor Planets
- Jupiter
- Saturn.

Touching the icons there will be the launch of one of 6 different Celestia softwares that I have loaded on the HD with different names (Celestia-1, -2, etc.), each of them with only the .ssc- .png- .jpg- .dds files that are needed for that single show, in order to save space.
Each show, with the exception of The Solar System, has HQ big textures, and gives a lot of informatio on the subject, showing e.g. many satellites, natural and artificial, different views , etc., and is projected on a big screen with a good video-projector.

And here is my help request to the developers group:

is it possible to obtain the same thing but loading Celestia on HD only once, and starting as before the 6 shows from the 6 desktop icons?

Moreover, is it possible to launch a sound file (.wav, e.g.), so that the show will be accompanied by its audio comment, starting both with the same icon touch?
I'm not a programmer, but I'm almost sure that there is the possibility to make a script able to do this.
And last, how can I change the text dimensions on the screen?
I think it?s enough to put other .txf files in "FONTS" directory, but where can I find this kind of files?
Please help me (and the many thousands of students that each year will visit our Museum).
Thank you very much.

Andrea

I am also interested in the educational aspects. Mainly, I would like to create scripts that could be used in shows like those seen inside planetariums. It would be incredibly useful for Astronomy clubs, classrooms, and maybe even planetariums.

It sounds like you are doing a great thing. What about using scripts to make movies? There is a menu option to create a movie. Would that work? If not, I am sure some sort of skin could be developed on top of Celestia so that the children/adults don't have to see the inner workings or play around with them in such a way so as to mess up the demo.

Michael

Michael, each of the shows I mentioned has its own .cel and solarsys.ssc files.
Each of the .cel scripts, launched with different Celestia installations, produces a planetarium show, exactly as you need.
About producing movies, it should be possible starting from version 1.2.4, but even if I have not yet tried to do it with Celestia, I know for my experience with other softwares that if you want a good image resolution (e.g. 1024x768), you'll produce an enormous file.
Consider that my "The Solar System" show lasts about 35 minutes, and this would mean probably the impossibility to produce a movie from that.
Anyhow I'm open to every suggestion, so I'll try to do it, and I'll inform you through the list about the results.
By soon

Andrea

Okay I have a better idea of what you need. Several people have asked for an option so that the configuration can be changed without reloading Celestia. I don't know when that will be coming. You can accomplish something similar to this using a *.bat file (if you are using a windows system) or a shell script. You would need six different configuration files, that would point celestia to the neded .cel and solarsys.ssc files. Your scripts could go something like this:

copy earth.cfg celestia.cfg
celestia

This moves the needed config file for the earth show to where celestia expects it and starts up celestia. Also you should be able to load up the sound using the same script. Though I am not sure how to do it with batch files.

Michael

It would be even better if a near-future version of Celestia would support command-line parameters for startup configs. Then you'd just need to modify the shortcuts' targets.

ex:
Target: CelestiaPath\Celestia.exe -SolarSystem

or

Target: CelestiaPath\Celestia.exe -InnerPlanets

Where "SolarSystem" and "InnerPlanets" are subdirectories containing the related config data. There's another thread discussing runtime add-on management that suggested something similar.

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

How about a batch file the copied the relevant files .ssc and .cel files into the right folders, and then launched celestia?