Celestia Forums

Hello Celestia Lovers !

This is my first post and the reason I write to you all is that I would like to inform you that I have created some big (10800x5400) maps for stars. They look like the surface of the sun and they come as maps in cylindrical projection. Smaller (but good) versions of this maps are available at my internet site. Because I am german and my site is in german too, I will give you the direkt link.

http://www.dirkkipper.de/Download_Sekti ... 13-16.html

Please look also at the renderings, the astronomy pictures which can be found at my site. The Terragen section is also very beautiful. Not the usuall stuff. Beautiful pictures in a good quality, rare to find ! http://www.dirkkipper.de/

Feel free to use them, they are better than the old ones which can be downloaded at the map page. Their original size is 10800x5400 Pixel, but I shrunk them down to 2048x1024 for a better handling.

By the way... is there anyone out there who has a starchart as a cylindriacla projection like the maps here ( http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/stars.html ), but in a higher resolution ? I would highly apreciate your help in this question, I need such a map for own animations. Maybe there is somebody able to create such a map for me ?

So enjoy my stuff and make cool animations !

my best

DIRK KIPPER
(a Celestia lover)

Dirk,

Unfortunately, Celestia requires that texture maps use simple cylindrical projection, not Mercator. If you want Celestia users to see your maps at their best, you'll have to change their projections.

Celestia can use much larger textures than 2Kx1K on star surfaces, but their dimensions do need to be a power of two on a side: 10800x5400 can't work with Celestia v1.4.1 and older.

For more information about these texture requirements, you might take a look at http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/textures.html

There are several Web sites that can generate images of the sky as large as you want, although you may need to patch the images together.

I like to use SkyView. It's described at
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/
but you'll probably want to use the "advanced form" at
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/skvadvanced.pl

I meant cylindrical projection, if you map it onto a globe, it will be displayed correctly. Therefore I corrected my post. Sorry, you can use this map with celestia of course.

,,, ups...