Realistic Mars texturing & screen image capture query

[sg]

My compliments to Chris Laurel and all contributors for their fine work.

When possible I download add-ons & textures to expand the universe in Celestia, opting for realism and detail.
I have just recently added some hi-res textures, from Fridger's site, to my installation of Celestia, including his 4k secular texture.

I will greatly appreciate some guidance in configuring “Mars” parameters in solarsys.ssc to best make use of the specular texture and other effects to give a realistic result. As you can see from the “Mars” “Sol” section of solarsys.ssc that I’ve pasted below, I have inserted SpecularColor & SpecularPower lines and adjusted the parameters to obtain visuals as can be seen in the image below. Although the results are impressive, I doubt whether I’ve got it quite right.

Here’s the Mars entry:
"Mars" "Sol"
{
# Texture "mars.jpg"
Texture "redmars8k-bmp-um-redcorr.dds"

SpecularTexture "mars4k-spec.dds"

SpecularColor [ 0.2 0.14 0.17 ]
SpecularPower 20.0

# BumpMap "marsbump1k.jpg"
# BumpHeight 2.5

Color [ 1 1 1 ]
HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
HazeDensity 0.3
Radius 3394

# Color [ 1 0.75 0.7 ]
# HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
# HazeDensity 0.45
# Radius 3394
# Oblateness 0.006

Atmosphere {
Height 30
Lower [ 0.8 0.6 0.6 ]
Upper [ 0.7 0.3 0.3 ]
Sky [ 0.83 0.75 0.65 ]
CloudHeight 7
CloudSpeed 65
CloudMap "mars-clouds.png"
}

CustomOrbit "vsop87-mars"
EllipticalOrbit
{
Period 1.8809
SemiMajorAxis 1.5237
Eccentricity 0.0934
Inclination 1.8506
AscendingNode 49.479
LongOfPericenter 336.041
MeanLongitude 355.453
}

RotationPeriod 24.622962
Obliquity 26.72
EquatorAscendingNode 82.91
RotationOffset 136.005

Albedo 0.150
}

The result:


Whenever I capture the screen in Celestia (using its built-in capture), I get a area of poor image quality and scattered white dots where the “Save as” dialogue appeared in the display. This should be apparent in the image above.
Is this a common problem, or something specific to my machine?

Thanks

Steve

[sg]

I guess it could be helpful if I include details of my system.
OS:
Windows Me

Athlon 1.4 GHz
512MB DDR RAM
GeForce 3 64MB DDR RAM

[Darkmiss]

Hello sg and welcome to Celestia

The white dots are a common problem, and a random one.
if you had taken three screen shot at the same time, at least one of them would have been fine.

I can't remember reading if Chris knows what is causing this yet ?

[selden]

Please read the "preliminary user's faq". It is a bug in Celestia, but it's not random and it's easily avoided. Just type a "u" twice before generating the picture.

[jim]

There is a simple solution for the white dots:

Press 'space' (pause) before you capture an image.

This works very fine for me.

Bye Jens

[Darkmiss]

Oh yeah thanks guys, I forgot about the Space bar (pause) thing.