Earth Day/Night

[RR]

Hi All

I hope I'm asking the correct question. I'm new here and have been using Celestia for a while now. I was wondering if there is available a more definitive terminator of the day/night for earth as well as lighter night texture depicting areas of dawn/dusk? Night appears to blend to far ahead of where it should be.

Also, I have comet tails enabled but I don't see any, i.e. Halley.

Thanks

Bill

3.02g
Asus P4G800
ATI 9700 Pro
Win XP
Dual NEC Monitors

[Seb]

Halley - you might just need to zoom out further...

Night & Day - I think dawn/dusk is more controlled by the GL routines, and not really under Celestia's control. (though I might be wrong)

In both cases, try using the Ctrl-V function for different texture rendering, which might help.

[RR]

Thanks Seb, I tried your suggestions. I managed to view the comet tails. You were correct, I didn't zoom out enough. The CTL v function also worked to some extent but it didn't provide the effect I was looking for.
Photos I've seen of the day/night line of earth is much more defined as opposed to that of Celestia. I thought perhaps there was an enhanced texture available that would achieve this.

Thanks again for your help

Bill

[Guest]

did you try switching off ambient-light?

[RR]

Yes. The ambient light though doesn't provide a crisper day/night line.

[Seb]

You can get higher resolution textures which usually results in more defined detail.

http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/earthnight.html

I generally suggest using 16k or 32k DDS textures, which should work fine on your system. I'm using a set of hi-res textures now myself, which I collect through trial and error (some are better than others, and bigger image size does not always mean a better texture)

Motherload is a very good source of textures, or try,

http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/earth.html

[RR]

Thanks for the links Seb. I found a set of city lights that look pretty good but am not sure how to install the png images. I put them in the lires folder but nogo. The files don't have a ctx file if that is needed.

I did find a more realistic set of city lights at Visible Earth: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov

City light image at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsro ... ts_lrg.jpg

Large image at: http://geography.about.com/gi/dynamic/o ... sp_big.jpg

I don't have a clue how to incorporate it into Celestia.

Bill

[/img]

[Seb]

You need to look at the files that Celestia uses, and get some knowledge of how they structured. Usefully, they are structured in a user friendly format, which makes it quite easy to understand and modify almost any part of Celestia.

Was hoping to just direct you to a page that gave a guide for new starters, but found a few dead links instead. If you have some good generally PC knowledge (assuming your a Windows PC user), have a look under 'C:\Program Files\Celestia\', your see things are almost self explanatory.

'data' folder contains information about the position of the Planet, Stars.

'textures' folder contains images for texturing the planets the etc.. You will need some software if you want to edit the DDS images.

The 'extras' folder can be used for adding extra files which Celestia will automatically incorporate when Celestia is started.

The .ssc files stored in the data folder can be opened using a text editor, these files detail the information to Celestia, which also contains the file names of textures to be used. If you change the file-names of the textures, you will likely need to edit this file.


If things do go wrong, you can always re-install Celestia.

There are some guides on this page, but I dont know if this covers what you need to know.. (as I havent read them)
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catal ... ation.html