Pandora Going Into Immersion 6 Seconds Before Arriving at Saturn's Ring Shadow

[TJackson]

I noticed that Pandora (a small moon or large asteroid orbiting Saturn) on May 13, 1676 goes from lit (13:04:39:27) to full immersion (completely in Saturn's shadow) (13:04:40:05) and only approaches Saturn's shadow upon its rings six seconds later (13:04:46:08), although Pandora appears to be in the same plane as the rings. Can anyone explain that?

[Sirius_Alpha]

This is caused by the fact that Celestia's shadowing does not take into account the oblateness of the planet. If you change Saturn to a perfectly spherical planet, Pandora will go into darkness at the correct time. On the other hand, the ring shadowing does take into account planet oblateness.

I created a "blimp" to orbit Saturn and exaggerated the planet's oblateness to show this visually.

[trappistplanets]

that is one very wide saturn

Added after 47 seconds:

I created a "blimp" to orbit Saturn and exaggerated the planet's oblateness to show this visually.

celestia DEVs really need to fix this, so celestia takes the oblateness into account when rendering shadows

[TJackson]

I see. Well, it just seemed to me that Celestia is an excellent product and very near being what, say, a NASA engineer might consider as a high precision tool, if youze guyz want to press on to that level of excellence. And thank you for your very informative and knowledgeable explanation. Regards.

Added after 9 hours 7 minutes:
Very good explanation, Sirius_Alpha. I'm impressed by how active, helpful and knowledgeable Celestia forum posters are. I've run poor SevenSpheres pretty ragged. Shall I submit trappistplanets' fix suggestion to 'DEV ideas' or to 'BUGS' or to GitHub? Still learning the etiquette here. Apologies.

[SevenSpheres]

Shall I submit trappistplanets' fix suggestion to 'DEV ideas' or to 'BUGS' or to GitHub?

As I said in your other thread, I've already opened an issue.