Celestia Forums

This article on Space.com talks about a black hole which they've now measured the location of.

Is it time to start including black holes in Celestia? (probably as a separate category like Stars)

The object called "v404 Cygni" is already in Celestia's database (1.6.0), but it can't be selected !!

It would be very easy to replace it with a black hole. But why can't we select the default object in the first place ? This is really annoying !

Chris ?

LOL !

This black hole is already in my BH database (NOT in Celestia's database), at the proper distance. It is GS 2023+338, aka V404 Cygni aka XN Cyg 1989.

See this thread, for the addon itself :

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=15543

I can select it with its first name, but I wonder why I can't select it with its other names...

So what do people think about making a new category for black holes?

There is already a class for black holes in Celestia.

In the STC file you can define the class of a star and there you have "X" assigned to black holes.

I don't think it would be good to make a special class for black holes as they are only a special case of a star or better said the end state of some starclasses.

Regards,

Guckytos

Is "X" the correct class for black holes? Or is there not one at the moment? Also, there are different types of black holes - don't they need subclasses?

It's a bit difficult to use the star browser - you can't search for stars there (I can't find v404 Cygni in it). Maybe a search function would help?

Also, why don't we make a black hole texture/model for black holes (not quite sure how we'd go about doing that).

Hmm, this is wandering a bit off topic for this board - should I cross-post it to dev?

ianmacfarlane wrote:Is "X" the correct class for black holes? Or is there not one at the moment? Also, there are different types of black holes - don't they need subclasses?

It's a bit difficult to use the star browser - you can't search for stars there (I can't find v404 Cygni in it). Maybe a search function would help?

After Celestia 1.6 we shall publish the distribution with the unified, Qt-based cross-platform GUI that we are developping in parallel since quite a while. It also has much better browsers for all sorts of objects including stars. You may use it already via SVN download and source-code compilation.

Also, why don't we make a black hole texture/model for black holes (not quite sure how we'd go about doing that).

Because naive models would be incompatible with our science-based approach for the official Celestia package. On the other hand, lacking a thorough implementation of General Relativity, Celestia is not equipped for more sophisticated BH visualizations. I am sure you can find plenty of (naive) BH add-ons among Cham's BH visualizations or also at the Motherlode.

...should I cross-post it to dev?

why?

Fridger

Thanks for the reply - any idea when the next version (1.7? 2.0?) is due out?

I found a list of known black holes on Wikipedia - are these all in the database?