Where can I find scripts?

[Mastiff]

Hi!
I tried searching for "download scripts", but didn't get anywhere. The only suggestion was Bruckner's page, but I find only addons there, no scripts. What I'm looking for is scripts I can run in my home theater (to some heavy space music, like Star One) and also something for my seven year old son. Can anybody help me out?

Thanks a lot in advance!
Tor 8)

[selden]

Tor,

Not a lot of scripts have been made publicly available for downloading. I'd suggest searching for just the keyword "script".

Of course, there are Celestia's startup and Demo scripts.

Slashi wrote a script generator which runs interactively on the Web at http://consul.com.ua/celestia/
The resulting script visits each of the planets and some of their moons, randomly if you want.

Andrea wrote a script to visit Pan (one of Saturn's "shepherd" moons). It's here in one of the Forum messages. See http://63.224.48.65/forum/viewtopic.php?t=503
For Andrea's script to work, you'll have to download and install the "minormoons" addon, since Pan's definition isn't shipped with Celestia.

I hope this helps a little.

[Ian Musgrave]

G'Day All

Hi!
I tried searching for "download scripts", but didn't get anywhere. The only suggestion was Bruckner's page, but I find only addons there, no scripts. What I'm looking for is scripts I can run in my home theater (to some heavy space music, like Star One) and also something for my seven year old son. Can anybody help me out?

Thanks a lot in advance!
Tor

Try this one, the close approach of 2002 MN to eartn on June 14.
=======snip mn.cel================
{
time { jd 2452439.5 }
select { object "Sol/2002 MN" }
follow {}
goto { time 5 }
gotolonglat { time 0 distance 5 longitude 270 latitude 30 }
timerate { rate 1000 }
wait {duration 5}
orbit { axis [ 1 0 0 ] rate 5 duration 25 }
}
============snip===========

A bit jerky but Okay

Cheers! Ian

[alan_federman]

I would be happy to download scripts and catalog them for folks.

Also if there are any really large files that take a lot of time to download, I can mirror them.

I am playing with scripts, so it will be a good exercise.

[Volker]

I am relatively new to Celestia, and first of all I want to congratulate all the contributors on their fine work.

Taking all the information I could gather from the forum, I tried to write a script showing the flight of Voyager 2 through the solar system. It is a bit lengthy (around 200 loc), and hence I don't know whether the forum is the right place to show the complete listing. In fact it is nothing exceptional. It is mainly assembled of gotolonglat, select, lock, and wait commands for each planet like in the excerpt below:

select {object "Voyager 2"}
gotolonglat {distance 5.0 longitude 125.0 time 25.0}
time {jd 2444844.0}
wait {duration 25.25}
select {object "Sol/Uranus"}
lock { }
timerate {rate 5000000.0}
wait {duration 20.0}
...
timerate {rate 3600.0}
wait {duration 30.0}

The main problem I had was the timing of variing time lapse when approaching a gas giant, i.e. moving faster when far away, and smoothly moving slower when in the near. I did it with a sequence of timerate and wait commands. However, the results are not reproducible; obviously a slight variance of the wait times (how long is 'one PC second' effectively?) in different runs results in slowing down too early or too late. Is there any better idea? If not, it would be helpful if the wait command had a parameter by which it could be linked to Celestia internal variables like the distance to an object or the Celestia clock.
Another (minor) question: When locking Voyager to a planet, is it possible to achieve an automatic initial view orientation from the spacecraft into the direction of that planet? The only way I saw was to find out correct gotolonglat longitude and latitude parameters by try and error.

Volker

[selden]

Volker,

I can't help with the timing problem, but is there some reason you didn't want to use the "center" and "lock" commands? I would have expected them to be more convenient than "gotolonglat".