40 million new stars.

[PlutonianEmpire]

http://www.space.com/16302-40-million-s ... urvey.html

Astronomers are mapping more than 40 million stars in the sky, recording the brightness and location of many faint stars that will be catalogued accurately for the first time, researchers say.

The stars are being charted as part of the American Association of Variable Star Observers Photometric All-Sky Survey (APASS), which is scanning the sky at a level 100 times fainter than any previous star-mapping expedition.

Might be time to expand that 2 million stars database soon.

[azorni]

You put a lot of smileys but seriously: can we hope to add those stars in the database soon? Would it severely slow down the computer?

[azorni]

Imagine for 40 millions stars
It gives, twenty more or 40 Mo x 20 = 800 Mo for the file...

To me 800 Mo might be Ok. And we don't have to add the whole catalog anyway. Several subsets can be released, depending on how much disk space the user is willing to give to Celestia.

I worry more about CPU consumption. A nice sky in Celestia would be pointless if we can't navigate smoothly.

[azorni]

Had you do the test with magnitude equal to 15.15 ?

I can only add stars up to magnitude 12 (unless there is something I miss). It seems to work fine. Moreover, there is no reason why the newly added stars would be all visible in the same time for a normal magnitude.

800 Mo on hard disk, imagine in RAM !!!

I don't know. It doesn't have to be completely loaded in RAM, does it? I mean, it could be mmapped for instance, right?

Well, I'm no expert so if you say it can't be done, I believe you, but it's kind of disappointing. To me the more stars, the better

[selden]

Please remember that Celestia is a 3D program. The APASS catalog and ones like it only specify the RA and Dec of stars, not their distances, so Celestia can't use them. The distances to a large number of stars won't be known until results are available from the Gaia astrometric satellite. It isn't scheduled to be launched until next year, and even preliminary results won't be available for quite some time after that. See http://www.esa.int/export/esaSC/120377_index_0_m.html

[azorni]

The APASS catalog and ones like it only specify the RA and Dec of stars, not their distances

I hadn't realized that. Thanks for pointing it out.

I hope I'll still be alive when the Gaia survey is published.