Celestia Forums

Why is there only one texture mapped on all the stars, in the most recent version of Celestia (official package) ? In some previous version, Celestia used several textures, depending of the spectral type. I think it's a bad thing to only show a single texture for all spectral types. Why then are there several star textures in the last official distribution (astar.jpg, bstar.jpg, gstar.jpg and mstar.jpg), if only one is really used ?

Is this a bug in the last version of Celestia ?

Not a single comment on this ?

Anyone confirm the stars has only one texture mapped, while there was many in a previous version of Celestia ?

The actual texture doesn't even match the atmosphere, for many of the star types.

Cham,

This was discussed when 1.4.0 came out.
See
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=56235

The only differences among the star textures provided with Celestia were their colors. A wider range of colors is now generated algorithmically from the SpectralType, so I suspect Chris didn't see any need to use different default textures, too.

Don't forget that you now can specify a particular texture for any individual star.

Personally, I'd like to see Celestia look for a different default texture for each stellar class. It seems reasonably well established now that the stellar surfaces do vary with the different types of stars, with larger or smaller convection cells, for example.

Unfortunately, someone will have to design all of those different surface textures. If appropriate textures actually were available, with valid astrophysical reasons for each of them, I suspect Chris (or one of the other developers) might be persuaded to upgrade the Star texture selection code.

Well then, the texture used doesn't match the star color and more specifically its atmosphere. All stars (on my system) are looking white, with some atmosphere variations (different atmosphere colors). This looks very unatural, and the previous version of Celestia was much better in this respect.

And if the current version of Celestia only uses one texture, why then are there many star textures in the lowres and medres folders ? Only one is used, while there are many others (astar, bstar, gstar and mstar) already in the textures directory.