Celestia Forums

Comet Machholz is just becomming a naked eye object, so here are the orbital elements, paste this into data\comets.ssc




This is my first conversion to celestia format, so it may not be completely correct, however a quick check shows the comet in the right position in the sky, so I think it is.


Increasing your orbit line segments is recommended, this one goes far, and the orbit looks very blocky near earth with the default 100.

You MAY wish to change "astroid.jpg" to the name of a texture
which COMES with Celestia. Try "asteroid.jpg"

Take care, Bob

Oops

Yes, do that, I flew to it, but I didn't think anything of it being white...it is a comet, afterall

Nerull,

if I had known that you already did make this job, I would have not spent my time to make a ssc-file by myself.

BTW: Your code seems to be correct, but the period is probably 119039.84 yrs. (AFAIK)

To whom it concerns: You find my ssc-file at the Celestia Motherlode
within the comets section -> http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/comets.php


What is the source of the following values, you use in your code:

Radius
RotationPeriod
Albedo

Are they just a guess? Or can you point me to a verified source?

Adirondack

I took them from the other comets in comets.ssc

Ahh, but I guess "Machholz" is not so big and it doesn't rotate as fast as your code describes. Unfortunately I did not found any information about these parameters at MPC or elsewhere.

I tried your code, but your Machholz is too far west. It should be rendered in Celestia on January, 7th 2005 near the Pleiades.

Try my .ssc-file (see above) and compare the position of the comet with yours.

Adirondack