About comet tail

General discussion about Celestia that doesn't fit into other forums.
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Vincent
Developer
Posts: 1356
Joined: 07.01.2005
With us: 19 years 10 months
Location: Nancy, France

About comet tail

Post #1by Vincent » 04.02.2005, 12:34

As I'm working on a script about the Deep Impact Mission, I'd like to point some improvement that could be done in comet's rendering in Celestia.

Comets tail is made of two components : (source : http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001227.html )
- The blue ion tail is composed of ionized gas molecules, of which carbon monoxide particularly glows blue when reacquiring electrons. This tail is created by the particles from the fast solar wind interacting with gas from the comet's head. The blue ion tail points directly away from the Sun.
- The white dust tail is created by bits of grit that have come off the comet's nucleus and are being pushed away by the pressure of light from the Sun. This tail points nearly away from the Sun.


So, is an improvement of comets tail coming for Celestia ? In that case, I'll wait for it before proposing my script in order to evitate confusion between these two components of comets tail.

Thanks for all the improvement you made in Celestia

@+
Vincent
@+
Vincent

Celestia Qt4 SVN / Celestia 1.6.1 + Lua Edu Tools v1.2
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