I only included textures I made myself from official NASA sources and individuals who share their textures on the internet openly and Celestia also uses (Bj?rn Johnsson, Phil Stoke, Snowfall the Cat & Steve Albers). At least I think so, I apologize for any errors. Models are from the 3D asteroid catalogue and NASA’s 3D resources.
I posted a similar thread on the temporary forum, but here a short summary of my catalogue update:
- Physical and orbital data update
- More default objects (many recently discovered ones)
- Texture and mesh updates
- Use of all available Celestia features
Minor objects are referred to invisible points instead of the sun, so they aren’t scattered around the solar system browser. It’s incompatible with the way the LUA plugins handle this problem, but if they aren’t included in Celestia 1.7, this is an alternative.
I redistributed objects in the catalogue files:
- Solarsys: planets, major moons and dwarf planets
- Asteroids: main belt asteroids, near earth asteroids and Jupiter Trojans
- Comets: great comets and those visited by spacecraft
- Outersys: Centaurs, Neptune Trojans and trans-neptunian minor bodies
- Moons-regular: small regular inner satellites, also from dwarf planets
- Moons-irregular: small irregular outer satellites of giant planets
Therefore, I changed the definition of some objects: I applied the definition of dwarf planet on satellites to determine the difference between minor and major satellites and moved minor ones out of solarsys.ssc, except of Nereid, Hyperion and Phoebe, since they are pretty important. Also I defined some objects as dwarf planets, which IAU doesn’t recognize yet, including Vesta (so Ceres isn’t so lonely in the asteroid belt
). It might be more intuitive to move the remaining minor satellites to their respective files, as well as the dwarf planets to asteroids and outersys. What do you think?
Also I changed the configuration and startup script. I changed the orbit color to darker tones for minor objects and some orbit colors highlight the orbital family.
I included additional object catalogues in extras-standard (asteroids, comets and trans-neptunians) which I selected more randomly and for personal reasons, if everyone starts to add their favorite minor planets this might get out of control. But I might as well put them to the default if no one has a problem with that.
!