Hi all... new alien to this solar system.

[vanjast]

Wow!.. If only I'd seen this beautiful piece of software a year or 2 ago.

I've been playing with it for 2 days now, and have gone through the scripting manual. I've a question which might be silly but I've have not yet seen an answer yet - still have a few 1000 forum pages to browse .

Does Celestia allow you to position the planets where you like ? I saw somewhere that you can make your own systems - must still look at this.

The reason I ask is that I would like to make a movie clip with the camera 'looking backwards' receding from the sun's surface and passing close to every planet, then out into the larger galaxy. Looking at the scripting stuff, I realise that I have to line up the planets and freeze their positions for the duration of the 'flight'.

Programming is no stranger to me, and physics and astronomy are my friends , so you can hit me with the technical stuff

Thanks
van

[ElChristou]

Hi, first of all, welcome!

For what you want to do, you don't need to align the planets; you can create a .xyz file to define a trajectory of an invisible object travelling through the solar system visiting each planets, then just follow it...

(As I'm not and expert in .ssc and .xyz definition, you will have to do some more search on the forum if you need more info.)

Hope this help.

Bye.

[rthorvald]

you don't need to align the planets; you can create a .xyz file to define a trajectory of an invisible object travelling through the solar system visiting each planets, then just follow it...

The XYZ file isn??t neccecary, though it is possible to do it that way. It may have some advantages, depending on the script...

I am not a scripting expert, but it should not be a problem to just write it traveling from world to world and aligning the camera underway - without any XYZ. Depending on the date, this will of course take you all over the place - so maybe find a date where there is some planetary alignment...

On the Celestia Motherlode there are scripts that do Solar System tours, maybe take a look at them to see examples. There are also some script generators around you can use to make the skeleton of your script.

Re modding the Solar System, yes, that is simple:
- remove all customorbit entries from the planet orbit definitions in Solarsys.ssc
- edit each planet??s Period entry so that they all orbit the sun at the same (Relative) rate - i.e. that all the planets gets a fixed position relative to each other
- Edit each planet??s MeanAnomaly to line them up

- rthorvald

[Chuft-Captain]

Re modding the Solar System, yes, that is simple:
- remove all customorbit entries from the planet orbit definitions in Solarsys.ssc
- edit each planet??s Period entry so that they all orbit the sun at the same (Relative) rate - i.e. that all the planets gets a fixed position relative to each other
- Edit each planet??s MeanAnomaly to line them up

This is good advice from Rthorvald, but the one thing he didn't mention (and probably worth mentioning as you're new), is that you should take a backup copy of Solarsys.ssc before you make these changes, so that you can easily restore the solar system when you're done (if you wish).
This will save you some grief later.

[vanjast]

Thanks all, just going through 'cel', 'celx' and 'Lua' stuff. I'll try that custom orbit thing first.