"Stars" Versus "Milky Way Clouds" in Cel

[vilhiem]

If I understand my astronomy correctly, ... the "clouds" we see here from Earth that comprise the Milky Way galaxy are not gaseous material but are indeed millions of "stars" that, over the great distance, look like clouds.

If that is true, than can a program such as Celestia ever incorporate all of the stars necessary to give the actual form and shape of the Milky Way? Or in other words, instead of inserting graphical "clouds" to represent our galaxy, ... could it be represented by the millions of stars themselves?

[Cham]

Millions of stars ? NO! BILLIONS! Celestia can't handle this ! Even with millions of stars only, you'll put celestia to its knees and it will be sloooooow! There's a file on the web (don't remember where) which gives 2 millions of stars in Celestia, but there's a warning near the file !

[Harry]

There's a file on the web (don't remember where) which gives 2 millions of stars in Celestia, but there's a warning near the file !

stars.dat with 2m stars:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/celestia.stars/index.html

Harald

[Mikeydude750]

Actually...the 2M star database works reasonably well as long as you keep the visible magnitude down. Since you can adjust it in Celestia, you might as well get the 2M database unless you have little memory(which would be more of a problem than graphics if you limit the number of visible stars).

[Jugalator]

Yup, I can recommend that one if you want lots of starts. It didn't really have much impact on my system at all, as it seems Celestia loads the whole thing into RAM at startup, but only actually renders the starts that you can see with your magnitude settings. So no special slowdowns etc here. Just a 5-10 sec extra startup time.

[Jugalator]

lol.. Why do I keep writing "starts". I need to get some sleep.

[selden]

Jugulator,

Of course, if you were to register, then you could edit your posts and none of us would realize just how bleary-eyed you are!