M2 Addon

mstshtml · Post #1by **mstshtml** » 21.05.2005, 18:22

Question here. I am going to create an add-on for Celestia. It is going to be M2. Messier 2 is Globular Cluster and I have data for many of the stars that M2 is made up of. Now, I am new to making add-ons for Celestia so I am wondering how to add a star in the "extras" folder. thanks
-Steve

Post #2by **selden** » 21.05.2005, 18:58

Steve,

Star positions are defined by creating a textual STC (STar Catalog).

See http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... intro.html

It includes pointers to STC documentation.

mstshtml · Post #3by **mstshtml** » 21.05.2005, 19:05

Great tutorial. Now if anyone has any sources on the specific star data for individual star in M2 then it would be really helpful

Post #4by **selden** » 21.05.2005, 19:55

Before you get into it too far, you need to realize that Celestia cannot draw stars reliably (they flicker and there are other graphics problems) when they're more than about 16KLY away from the sun. M2 is about 37KLY from us.

You might want to consider a closer globular cluster.

PlutonianEmpire · Post #5by **PlutonianEmpire** » 22.05.2005, 01:18

selden wrote:Before you get into it too far, you need to realize that Celestia cannot draw stars reliably (they flicker and there are other graphics problems) when they're more than about 16KLY away from the sun. M2 is about 37KLY from us.

You might want to consider a closer globular cluster.

Are there any plans to fix that problem at all?

Post #6by **selden** » 22.05.2005, 13:12

My understanding is that Chris hopes to improve this in some future version of Celestia. Other improvements have higher priority, though.