Celestia Forums

So, for reasons that are strange I have wound up with one of my walls painted bright green. One day, I was thinking, "wouldn't it be fun to make a Mars weather report like it was a local weather report?" I would stand in front of a mars globe and point out how "It's a balmy -11 degrees today at Tharsis" with H and Ls and local temps...

Well, it turns out, you actually have global weather data from Nasa freely available! You can even generate maps and pull "Local" weather conditions from the probes on the surface! Cool... Now I need to make some fun animations...

I was playing with Blender but I'm looking for something a little more realtime. Something where I have the camera as a wide view of the planet and then I can zoom in on various parts like a satellite view.. I will also like to "fade in" overlays like temperature heat maps and also animate a 5 day forecast. The data is no problem, and I can make the maps. but can you do that with scripting with Celestia? Where would you start? I'm assuming Lua would be my best bet?

Yes, it can be done, although writing the script doubtless would take some time.

Both .CEL and .CELX scripts can be used to adjust Celestia's viewpoint, take it to specified locations and display textual information on the screen. .CEL scripts are easier to write but don't have the looping and other functionality that .CELX scripts (which are written in Lua) can provide.

CEL scripting, including equivalent .CELX code, is documented in the Celestia WikiBook. See, for example, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia/Scripting

Scripting user guides are available on the documentation page at http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/documentation.html

Scripts that you might be able to use as starting points are available on the Celestia Motherlode at http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/scripts.php