How do you add more stellar classes in Celestia?

[Joey P.]

How do you add more stellar classes in Celestia? I want to add other Wolf-Rayet subtypes and have separate textures for type B and late K-type stars. Thanks!

[SpaceFanatic64]

You can't, as far as I know.

[onetwothree]

Indeed, stellar classes are hardcoded

[pirogronian]

Indeed, stellar classes are hardcoded

What obviously should be changed, but not until we are finish our current tasks or someone else come to help.

[Sirius_Alpha]

My understanding is that you can't as well. It would be nice to see this improved though, especially with spectral type Y objects being a thing now, as well as free-floating planetary-mass objects.

[Joey P.]

If you try to assign a star a class in an .stc file that is not O, B, A, F, G, K, M, R, N, S, W, white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, it will be assigned the class ? and will be given the default A-class texture.

[onetwothree]

It will be a "Normal star with unknown parameters", dunno about texture, I'm too lazy to check the source code.

[Kilo_SSK]

Yes, that's what I wanted to ask, if you can't create a whole new class, isn't it possible to weasel through the preexisting categories and create something appropriate for your needs going from something that's already present?

[Joey P.]

I would also like to add hypothetical stars, such as H-type (frozen stars), Planck stars, and quark stars.

As for the Quasi-star, it can simply be made by renaming X Cygni (HIP 102276).

[Joey P.]

you can, however, without modifying any of the stellar classes, add a Thorne-Zytkow object (a star, usually a red giant, with a neutron star as a core):

Code: Select all

"Thorne-Zytkow object:TZO"
{
   RA 107.7430367
   Dec -77.7775654
   Distance 772
   SpectralType "M1III"
   AppMag 2.18
   Radius 13924000
}

"Thorne-Zytkow core"
{
   RA 107.7430367
   Dec -77.7775654
   Distance 772
   SpectralType "Q"
   AppMag 20
   Radius 12
   Texture "bstar.*"
}


[Droopy Angora]

Also looking forward to this. The DarkerStarTextures mod is one good step to having O, F and K class stars look more realistic, that is if you run Celestia on Windows or at least desktop/laptop OSs. But about adding new star classes, only the dev team could do so...

The big advantage of Celestia as a scientific tool is the possibility of simulating an astronomically realistic universe, so I totally agree with adding those new types of stars into the source code of the app. Adding other hypothetical bodies could be great also, who never dreamed of travelling around a quark star ?

[SevenSpheres]

Droopy Angora, reviving a 2 year old thread is necroposting, which is discouraged here. I'm not sure what star classes you're suggesting should/will be added, but spectral classes Y and WO have already been added, and quark stars (which you mention) can just be defined as neutron stars.