Post #2by selden » 17.03.2007, 21:16
Primarily it's an issue of precision.
The distance units used to place Star objects within Celestia are much smaller than the distance units used to place DSC objects, so Stars can be placed at much more accurate locations than DSC objects can be placed.
As a result, however, the "yardstick" used to place Stars is much shorter than the one used to place DSC objects.
Chris is hoping to provide a way around this limitation in a future version of Celestia, perhaps by being able to specify additional "origins" for the relative placement of Star objects.
p.s.
One could simulate stars using Nebula objects, but they couldn't have planets orbiting around them. Also, Celestia does not currently handle them very well. For example, large numbers of them would cause Celestia to run very slowly, since Nebula objects are not yet stored using an "octree" data structure.
Selden