Kudos, Questions and an idea

[Matthias]

First of all: Kudos for this great program! That's something one really can get lost in...

A Question: As I tried to check out one of my favorite telescope objects, Eps Lyr, I was disappointet to see it only as a binary system consisting of Eps1 and Eps2 - in reality, both are in turn close binaries. As these four components even show up in the Bright Stars Cataloge, I wonder why they didn't find their way into the much more detailed Celestia-Catalogue.

An Idea: Why not provide current cloud data for Earth? I tried to plug a current cloud texture from EarthBrowser (a program that can grab the current clouds via HTTP-Get) into Celestia, but the result was not really convincing - perhaps a problem of scaling, projection, contrast or all of the above. Maybe somebody is interested in investigating?

Cheers

Matthias

[billybob884]

The only problem with that would be is you would have to constantly replace the cloud texture to keep it up-to-date on our constantly changing clouds.


Mike M.

[Troy]

This is an interesting point that I think will be explored in the future. An ideal situation would have automated download and replacment while Celestia is running.

Linux users can already handle the automatic download and replacement using a bash script and the texture available at http://xplanet.sourceforge.net ( note that the texture needs to be resized ), but currently you'll need to restart Celestia to have it reload it's textures. Perhaps in future Celestia versions it can either have a texture-reload hotkey, or an automated update interval?