Hill Sphere Radius

[Garyw]

I've been looking at the hill sphere radius calculations and I wondered if there was any way of displaying the hill sphere radius of a planet and/or moon in Celestia?

Is there a celx for this?

Thanks!!

[Lafuente_Astronomy]

I've been looking at the hill sphere radius calculations and I wondered if there was any way of displaying the hill sphere radius of a planet and/or moon in Celestia?

Is there a celx for this?

Thanks!!

That would be a great idea to implement. Although I think it may have been implemented already.

[selden]

One way to do it is to draw the outline of a sphere which consists only of lines instead of solid facets.

The attached Hill_sphere.zip shows the Earth's Hill sphere using a plain-text ASCII CMOD mesh. You can modify its colors using your favorite text editor.

Hill_sphere.zip

includes "grid_sphere.cmod"

(111.75 KiB) Downloaded 144 times

Earth's Hill sphere using a spherical grid

Edited to add: Of course, the actual "Hill sphere" isn't really a sphere at all, since it's affected by the gravitational fields of other nearby bodies, like the Moon. *shrug*

[Garyw]

Thanks, that's an interesting way of doing it and yes, I realise that there are other things that affect the true hill sphere radius but this was just for a quick and dirty demo about what the hill sphere is and why it matters.