If you've been following the separate thread regarding an Activity I'm developing which takes you through the Life cycle of Stars (and the Destruction of Earth), I'm pleased to advise that the Activity is now complete and hopefully, debugged. Thanks to Don Goyette's great editing, and the stupendous add-ons made available by other forum folk, I think you will love this effort. The Activity will take you on a rich journey through the complete life and death cycle of stars. Over 20 stops are made to such places as stellar nebula nurseries, rotating protostars, main sequence, white, yellow and blue supergiants, Red Giant stars, exploding nova and supernova, glaring white dwarfs, hot neutron stars, spinning pulsars, enormous black holes and dying black dwarfs (theoretical). You will see the death of Earth as it is consumed by a swelling Red Giant, and discover what Mars, Jupiter and even Pluto may look like billions of years in the future, as our Sun nears the end of its life.
The Activity is written in MS Word and is 20 pages long. It assumes no prior knowledge of Celestia and is a step by step journey that takes about 1 -2 hours to complete in real time. Most of the travel is by imbedded cel:url links within the document, but some travel is done with the spaceship or with the goto objects features of Celestia.
I've tried to make this a scientifically accurate portrayal of how both regular and large stars live and die. It is designed for anyone who has an interest in the topic
The Activity is version 6.2 and requires (gasp) 57 MB of add-on files. I have packaged and zipped them all together in five (5) separate zip files on my website. You can find them at:
http://www.fsgregs.org/celestia/
That is a lot of files to download but the Activity really requires them. These add-ons are in part existing add-ons from the forum and in part, custom designed add-ons that many of you folks did for me to support my work on the NASA project. I want to particularly thank Rassilon, Don Edwards, Dave Nessler and Jack Higgins for their great design efforts in some of the add-ons.
The add-ons on my website are in fact, being hosted by a friend on his server. If you have a dial-up modem, please don't try to download 57 MB all at once. Perhaps you can do it late at night so as not to tie up his server.
Part A of the zip files contains the Activity and a read-me file. Read that file first. In it, you will discover that in order to do the Activity, you will have to do some minor editing of your solarsys.ssc file. I tell you what to do in the Read-me file.http://www.fsgregs.org/celestia/
Let me know what you think of the Activity. If you encounter any problems with the add-ons (they were quite complicated to coordinate), send me a private message.
This is a true labor of love, done over 40 man-hours on a voluntary basis. Celestia inspired me to do it. I hope you all enjoy the journey.
Regards,
Frank
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