Implementation request: surface locations

[Guest]

I think that something not very difficult to implement but useful should be the surface locations management.

I mean that a lot of locations on planet and satellite surfaces have names.
Think at Moon, Mars and ... Earth too.
Should be fine going exactly in the landing place of Mars Pathfinder or 20 Km over the Mars volcanos.
But also watching the sky and constellations from New York tonight at midnight, should be amazing.

I think that the locations should be managed simply using a name, altitude-longitude-latitude coordinates as a subclass of the body in a .ssc file.

Clickable labels or points over the planets should need more work. I thought that at the moment an easy implementation of the System Browser should be sufficent.

I think that the system should work fine in a near future for the management of the landing over surfaces too. To land somewhere first I'll need to decide where, don't you agree?

[Sum0]

It would be great to have major cities and locations (on other planets) preprogrammed into Celestia. The locations menu does most of this, but it should show up on the planet as a label.

[chris]

I've been thinking about this for a while . . .

In Celestia 1.2.6, I plan to add a very flexible location labelling system. 'Markers' will have a label, location, and coordinate system. The coordinate system can be absolute (what I call 'universal' in Celestia), relative to the center of an object (planetocentric), or a rotating reference frame relative to the center of an object (planetographic). You'll be able to specify labels in .ssc files as well as mark locations inside Celestia. I'd also like to enable Celestia to do things like mark all stars will planets or mark all stars within 10 light years.

--Chris

[HankR]

One thing I enjoy doing with Celestia is orbiting with the International Space Station and watching the earth roll by below. It would be very nice if there were labels for surface features which would identify the islands, lakes, rivers, mountains, deserts, and other features as they pass by. Ideally I would want to be able to control the classes of features for which labels are displayed, as well as level of detail based on feature size or significance. It would also be nice if features with large areal extent could have labels positioned based on the area visible rather than pre-defined label points. Feature labelling would also be very useful on the Moon, Mars, Io, and several other bodies in the solar system for which feature names and coordinates are available from NASA. (I realize this is somewhat off-topic, although surface locations as discussed here seem related.) Just a thought...

- Hank

[ddaniels_]

Perhaps wrong place to ask/post but, I've been looking for an earth simulator that would allow me to locate my 'shoebox' of digital photos to my 'own virtual earth', you know, I was in the grand canyon when I was six...drop my photo on the (approx) location and move on in time and space to the next location. Is this possible with celestia or with another app? many many thanks from a 'citizen of the world'.
dgd