Celestia Forums

The Educational Activities are so outstanding that I use that version of the Celestia installation for all of my Celestia touring. All of the new add-ons I download go into the Educ. Activities folders and directories.

Does anyone know if the Educ.l Activities will be updated to work with Celestia 1.4.0, and whether they will be updated with the latest greatest add-ons such as Cham's "Full featured Black Holes in the 47 Tucanae globular cluster" (which requires Celestia 1.4.0) or rthorvald's "Portrait of our Sun?"

Just wondering.

Dear Sky Pilot:

Thank you for your compliments. I am delighted you enjoy my Educational Activities so much.

The Educational Activities will eventually be updated to work fine in 1.4.0. The main problem is the star.dat file. The star data file used for the Activities, which includes over 1 million stars and which provides a rich night sky, does not work in 1.4.0. If that file was updated, things would be fine. Updating it, however, is apparently difficult. I'm not sure why Chris altered the way 1.4.0 reads the star file, but hopefully, someone will work it out. In the meantime, you can get around that problem as follows:

Open the celestia.cfg file that I include with the Activities. You can find it in the main Celestia folder.

Near the beginning, locate the line that reads:
StarDatabase "data/bigstars.dat"

Change it to read:
StarDatabase "data/stars.dat"

(remove the word "big")

To the best of my knowledge, the Activities will now work in 1.4.0. If not, let me know.

A new Activity 8 will be released next week. In some ways, it is my best. It covers most of the spacecraft that we have launched to explore the rest of the Solar System outside of Earth. It also takes you to visit the StarWars and Star Trek solar systems, along with fictional spacecraft from the movies 2001, a Space Odyssey and Babylon 5. I am waiting for Huygens to land on Titan before I release it. Look for it on the Education page of the Motherlode and my own website.

I will incorporate new add-ons into revised versions of the Activities as time goes on. Look for updates every few months.

Regards,

Frank Gregorio