Celestia Forums

I've added the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft to Celestia 1.4.0 Pre6. When I position myself about .06 ly from Sol, and turn on rendering for spacecraft, I can see the two Voyagers and two Pioneers that are leaving our solar system. From this vantage point, it looks really really cool.

However, when I speed up the time (even way WAY up to the max!), the spacecraft don't move -- I would have exptected their trajectory lines to grow outward from Sol. Is this because there are no trajectories for these objects?

Most likely, yes. Or, rather, the ones you have don't go that far. When an object has a path defined by an xyz file and Celestia's time is before or after its ends, Celestia places the object at either the first or last location defined in the file.

xyz trajectories are plain text files. There are 4 values for each position: julian date, x, y z, in that order. Look at the last entries in them to see the last date that they're valid. (If you're like me, you'll need a Julian to Gregorian converter to figure it out. There are many available on the Web.)

Hello I am very new to the Celestia space sim but so far have found it fasinating. One thing is puzzling me, I down loaded the add ons for the Voyager and Pioneer probes, but find it strange that the orientation of the probes is all wrong. Should the High Gain antenna be pointing towards earth? Can this be adjusted easily?