The 16000ly limit

[Malenfant]

I just realised something - I've always thought that the 16,000ly limit for stars exists because of some kind of software limitation - but if that's the case, why can we place galaxies at much greater distances?

In other words, what's the difference between a star and a galaxy in terms of how Celestia interprets a stc or dsc? Couldn't we just have star locations determined in the same way that galaxies are?

[buggs_moran]

See this post http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7868

Definitely read through the whole post. I believe it boils down to precision. The further out you get from Sol, the more imprecision in the software rendering. Chris explains it well and had ideas for solutions back in 2002.

There are several solutions to this that I'm considering. I could simply increase the range for special handling, but this has performance implications. The performance problems could be offset by increasing the special-handling range as the camera's distance from the Sun increased. This isn't very general, but it would work reasonably well with the existing database, where the star density increases toward the origin. The real long-term solution is to allow multiple star databases, each referred to a different center. This is analgous to the way that solar systems are handled now, with the coordinate system for planets 'rezeroed' to the location of central star.