Celestia Forums

Hi folks,

I fizzeled last night something together... if I can't have true orbiting of all Castor system members, I put them into an additional star database. I know somebody did it before but posted only a screenshot... so here's the data I created. Note it's only derivative work, I downloaded some Castor data from this forum and boosted it up.
Some of the data is questionable, for we do not know that much abot the Castor system. And Celestia accepts two stars only if they are seperated more than 0.1 AU which is clearly too much for the spectroscopic binaries of Castor. Sigh.

There could be disscussion if the companions Castor A2 and B2 are really that bright -- see "Castor 6" at solstation.com for that. I put in what I felt Castor should look for me. You can change it if you want -- try specral type "K5V" for both stars, AbsMag then should be between 5.0 and 6.0 , it's maybe more realistic.

#
#
# Castor System -- Diane Neisius aka Medusa (diane_va@yahoo.com)
# separation of stars is ~0.1 au,
# a factor of 5 too large but celestias minimum
#
# the stuff below is derivated data (09/28 2004)
#
#

# 999001 Castor A1 in stars.dat, edit starnames.dat for name "Castor A1"

999002 "Castor A2:Alf Gem A2:66 Gem A2"
{
RA 113.65002
Dec 31.888635
Distance 51.551605
SpectralType "A2V"
AbsMag 1.0
}

999003 "Castor B:Castor B1:Alf Gem B:66 Gem B:HD 60178"
{
RA 113.6495833
Dec 31.88861111
Distance 51.553
SpectralType "A2V"
AbsMag 2.61
}

999004 "Castor B2:Alf Gem B2:66 Gem B2"
{
RA 113.6495833
Dec 31.8886135
Distance 51.5530006
SpectralType "A3V"
AbsMag 3.0
}


999005 "YY Gem A:Castor C:Castor C1:Alf Gem C1:HD 60179 C1"
{
RA 113.6558583
Dec 31.86938611
Distance 51.553
SpectralType "M0V"
AbsMag 8.83
}

999006 "YY Gem B:Castor C2:Alf Gem C2:HD 60179 C2" {
RA 113.6558583
Dec 31.86938611
Distance 51.5530012
SpectralType "M0V"
AbsMag 8.83
}


Have fun with it!

Greetings, ~Medusa.

I have a very similar .stc in the Orion's Arm Universe addon;
the originals, posted by Grant and Chaos syndrome, are no doubt more realistic, showing the companion stars of each of the primary pairs to be red dwarfs.

As the OA universe is fictional, we can change the specifications of stars at will;
for the other interpretations, see this
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... ght=castor

Eburacum,

I saw that link you gave but there are none of the spectroscopic companions. Therefore I did some additional data work.
Concerning fiction, well we do not know much hard facts about Castor and similiar systems. Therefore a lot of things sold as "reliable science" is in fact pure fiction of the authors (without being marked as such). Believe me, I worked for a couple of years in science.
So we should not forget what Celestia shows us at the screen is our subjective universe model, not more, whatever the source of the data is. But that is a philosophical question.

~Medusa.