Help needed: Problem with Saturn

[astroguy]

I installed Celestia 1.5.1 on Ubuntu 8.10 about a week ago, and everything seems to be working as it should, except that Celestia closes unexpectedly whenever I try to view Saturn. Whether I use the navigation menu, or the keyboard sequence 6-G, or a script such as Don Goyette's

SunAndPlanetsSizeComparison_1_0_4.cel

script, the result is always the same -- Celestia crashes when Saturn comes up.

Does anyone know what the problem might be? I'll be giving an astronomy lecture to a group of children next Tuesday as part of my IYA2009 programme, and I was hoping to use Celestia.

Please help!

Thanks.

[John Van Vliet]

--- edit ---

[selden]

Celestia crashing when viewing Saturn usually is caused by a buggy graphics driver.

You might try selecting a less demanding render path. Type a Ctrl-V several times to step through the render paths that Celestia thinks your OpenGL graphics driver supports. Basic can't show as much of the eye candy as the other render paths, but uses older, better debugged, OpenGL routines.

What model graphics hardware do you have?
What driver are you using?
What render paths does Celestia have available to it?

[astroguy]

Thanks for your advice and help.

I've been using the Gnome front-end for Celestia because it has a cleaner interface compared with KDE. But that seems to be the cause of the Saturn problem -- when I installed the KDE front-end, the problem disappeared.

By the way, the old SunAndPlanetsSizeComparison_1_0_4.cel script works perfectly on Celestia 1.5.1.