Celestia Forums

Hi, Obviously Celestia rocks, but i think a few things would make it totally perfect.

* Allow specifications of stars relative to galaxies for .scc/.dsc files.
(clearly, refence would have to be relative to each galaxy separately instread of Ra, Dec from Sol, but its probably not that difficult). Granted, this would only be useful for fictional places.. for the time being

* Crosshairs option for navigation - sometimes its hard to tell where the center of the screen is, and the planets just zoom by.

* Optional brightness for galaxies. once we leave the local group and pass andromeda, its hard to see where all the glaxies are - too dim. I modified the point files representing the S* glaxies so that the 4th number is 100 instead of 0.something. This way the glaxies are bright until you get close to them, but at that point they are sufficienly large to see in their dim state.

A few other things come to mind, but they are even more minor. Overall Clestia is BEAUTIFUL! Thanks a lot, guys!

vdizhoor

For your navagation question, there is a very very good script for navagation callled "Celestia Explorer" (look in the Celestia Motherlode under scripts). It was written by an expert in space flight to create a realistic space flight experiance and comes with a good manual. Other than that just use the marker function on the object that you want to "fly" to and it will be easier to navigate to it.

These are just some ideas for your immediate use.

vdizhoor wrote:* Optional brightness for galaxies. once we leave the local group and pass andromeda, its hard to see where all the glaxies are - too dim. I modified the point files representing the S* glaxies so that the 4th number is 100 instead of 0.something. This way the glaxies are bright until you get close to them, but at that point they are sufficienly large to see in their dim state.

did you try to adjust the light-gain using SHIFT + "(" and ")" ?

Thanks, phoenix, I actually found the light gain feature by accident minutes after I posted the comment. You are right, It helps a lot. I guess I wished that the center of the galxis was a little brighter, - I'll play with correspodning models, see what I can do.

StarshipWrigt, thanks for you suggestion. I gave Celestia Explorer a try. Very nifty. But a little too suffisticated for me. I'll probably simplify it for my own humble uses .

I guess there is no easy way to hack optional star location specification (as in not relative to earth), maybe it'll be possible in some future version of Celestia.

Thanks guys!

vdizhoor wrote:...
I guess I wished that the center of the galxis was a little brighter, - I'll play with correspodning models, see what I can do.
...

It is no problem whatsoever to make the galaxy core brighter in the code. But the present setup seems to be the best overall compromise.

I can only recommend to switch on 'automag' (CTRL+y), which gives a much better illumination of galaxies and a greater visibility of faint galaxies at small field of view.

If people refrain from using automag, it's up to them to continuously adjust brightness...

Before fiddling around with incorrect adjustments, it's important for people to understand that in case of galaxies TWO constraints counteract:

1) the huge range of brightness from very faint galaxies to bright ones like Andromeda that we want to display

2) the meager dynamic range of computer monitors that simply cannot cope with this.

Bye Fridger