Celestia Forums

I'd like some clarification here after issues arising in discussions with Grant Hutchison.

Basically, what is the status of the hand-edited data files (nearstars.stc, extrasolar.stc, revised.stc)? The impression I'm getting is that further development to the star data distributed with Celestia is that it is going to be entirely based around large catalogues with no updates to the hand-edited files which remain as "legacy" files.

chaos syndrome wrote:I'd like some clarification here after issues arising in discussions with Grant Hutchison.

Basically, what is the status of the hand-edited data files (nearstars.stc, extrasolar.stc, revised.stc)? The impression I'm getting is that further development to the star data distributed with Celestia is that it is going to be entirely based around large catalogues with no updates to the hand-edited files which remain as "legacy" files.

All of these files are necessary right now. revised.stc contains corrections for stars from stars.dat. Stars.dat is a 'pure' translation of the HIPPARCOS catalog, which has known errors. Rather than edit stars.dat itself, we've collected all the corrections into revised.stc. Extrasolar.stc is necessarily hand-edited--there is no single source for the disparate star types in that catalog. Nearstars.stc has orbital data for stars in multiple star systems that I haven't seen anywhere else. I don't believe that it's possible to collect all that data without some amount of hand editing.

--Chris

--Chris

So there would be no objections to adding entries to these files in the future?

It depends on what you want to do . . . If there's an extrasolar planet discovered orbiting some star that's not in stars.dat, visualbins.stc, or spectbins.stc, then we'll probably need to add a record to extrasolar.stc by hand. I'd prefer to use purely programmatically translated catalogs, but the reality is that sometimes the choice is between either hand-edited or incomplete data.

What did you have in mind?

--Chris

Hmmm... when did I become Chris?