Black hole location

[ianmacfarlane]

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)

[Cham]

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 ?

[Cham]

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...

[ianmacfarlane]

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

[Guckytos]

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

[ianmacfarlane]

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?

[t00fri]

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

[ianmacfarlane]

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

[ianmacfarlane]

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