Celestia Forums

Somehow, I seem to have duplicate add-ons - can someone help me figure out which ones I need?

I have:

Asteroid-Belt.ssc
JACKbinaries.ssc - binary asteroids
JACKcentaur_tno.ssc - named centaurs/scattered disk objects
JACKneo(quasi-sats).ssc
JACKtiny_or_new_moons.ssc - small Jovian moons (numbered)
JACKvoyager-xyz.ssc
kuiperbelt.ssc (only contains Quaoar)
minormoons.ssc - named minors moons of jovians
new_extrasolar.ssc -
numberedmoons.ssc - additional moons of jovians
stellarcompanions.ssc (x2)
voyager.ssc
nearstars.stc

Obviously one of the stellarcompanions needs to go, but what about the rest? I'm sure I must have lots of duplicate moons here, plus whatever comes with the latest version of Celestia (1.3.2pre6)

Does anyone know what I need to get the latest versions of those, without duplicating them?

Hey, sorry to say it, but -

You've got hours of work ahead of you, unless someone else knows something better. I did the same thing once, and I went through each file looking for duplicates, checking Celestia, and looking again. It really is worth it in the end to have it all perfect! Just do a file a night for a week - you'll be all set.

I agree with you, it's a very hard job to find duplicates. I had this problem too.

After a lot of works, I think I've solved almost all of my Celestia problems. I probably still have some duplicates or some missplaced files, but it's working nicely.

My standard version of Celestia is now taking 1.6 GB on my HD and I can safely say it's a well configured version.

Work hard and be patient. It's the price to pay to have a free software of this quality. It's well worth it

Ideally I think there should be only one person producing each of these files. That way we'd know when new versions are produced when they tell us here that will definitely not contain overlaps, rather have three or four different people making their own extras files that may or may not contain duplicate objects. Add to that the fact that Celestia itself now appears to contain some of these objects by default too....

That's not the Celestia way ! More and more ppl are coming to Celestia, and more and more ppl will do addons for it. The future of Celestia isn't easy.

Cham wrote:That's not the Celestia way ! More and more ppl are coming to Celestia, and more and more ppl will do addons for it. The future of Celestia isn't easy.

"Open Source" doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be confusing too. Lots of people could work on the same project, so long as one person is in charge of releasing and updating the file at the end of it. All it needs is a bit more co-ordination, is all - it seems a bit silly for many people to be doing the same things in different ways. After all, someone could release an addon that just had all of Jupiter's moons discovered up til 2002, and then another person could release the same thing up to 2003, and the files could have the same names, and then Chris could add some of those to Celestia, and it'd all be really, really confusing!

The "official" moons files for Celestia are minormoons.ssc and numberedmoons.ssc. The current version is always available on the CVS tree, and I keep them up to date as JPL Horizons adds each new ephemeris ... so there are usually a couple of newly-discovered moons that aren't in the file because there is no ephemeris for them.
Jack ran his own moons file in parallel for a while, which more or less duplicated the Celestia version; that's JACKtiny_or_new_moons.ssc. I don't know how recently he's updated it. If you remove his file you should get rid of a huge number of duplicated moons. As far as I'm aware, the only "extra" in that file is the recently recovered Uranian from the 1980s, for which Jack provided old elements. There are no new elements for it, so it doesn't yet appear in the Celestia files.

Grant

More information: stellarcompanions.ssc and nearstars.stc are my add-on to more-or-less complete the representation of local space out to 25ly ... it doesn't look like there would be conflict with any of the other files you list (judging from their names) and I'm not aware of anyone else producing a similar add-on.
I've never heard of new_extrasolar.ssc, but I'd guess there's potential conflict with the Celestia distribution extrasolar.ssc, which lists all the exoplanets from the Extrasolar Planets Catalog ... I keep this updated each time the Extrasolar Planets Catalog is updated.

I'd suggest you contact Jack Higgins for information on potential conflicts relating to his various "JACK" files.

Grant

grant wrote:Jack ran his own moons file in parallel for a while, which more or less duplicated the Celestia version; that's JACKtiny_or_new_moons.ssc. I don't know how recently he's updated it.

Ages and ages ago - it's safe to say that there will be no more updates for this ever. I'll probably delete it off my site sometime soon too, when I get a chance.

grant wrote:I'd suggest you contact Jack Higgins for information on potential conflicts relating to his various "JACK" files.

Evil Dr. wrote:JACKbinaries.ssc - binary asteroids
JACKcentaur_tno.ssc - named centaurs/scattered disk objects
JACKneo(quasi-sats).ssc
JACKtiny_or_new_moons.ssc - small Jovian moons (numbered)
JACKvoyager-xyz.ssc

1. I don't think there is any other ssc for binary asteroids available- although this file really needs to be updated...
2. These are only the biggest TNO's which have names, a few are included in solarsys.ssc, so you might want to do a manual check of these
3. These are a few asteroids which have an unusual orbital synchrony with earth, haven't seen them anywhere else!
4. tiny/new moons can be dropped & replaced with grant's
5. This is the ssc-xyz file for the uber-high-res voyager xyz's, which is the most accurate voyager xyz available. So you'll want to keep this... (other voyager can go)

Crickey...I can see more beer coming! I need my extrasolars back!