2003 EL61?
2003 EL61?
At present, 2003 EL61 is represented as spherical in Celestia, when the information we have about it suggests it is elongated. Is the orientation known well enough to represent this in Celestia - it would be interesting to see how the orbits of the moons compare to the orientation of the long axis.
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chris
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Re: 2003 EL61?
chaos syndrome wrote:At present, 2003 EL61 is represented as spherical in Celestia, when the information we have about it suggests it is elongated. Is the orientation known well enough to represent this in Celestia - it would be interesting to see how the orbits of the moons compare to the orientation of the long axis.
I understand that the shape of 2003 EL61 is speculated to be roughly like that of an American football. One current limitation of Celestia is that you can specify the oblateness of a ellipsoidal body, but not the three axes independently. We could always use a mesh to represent the object, but I was holding off on modifying the shape of 2003 EL61 until I add support for a SemiAxes property in ssc files.
--Chris
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chris
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chaos syndrome wrote:Ok. Is there any kind of ETA for this feature?
It's easy to add, but I'm trying to focus on bug fixing until 1.5.0 final is ready. As soon as I'm done with that, it will take me only a few hours to add a method for specifying triaxial ellipsoids. There's already a SemiAxes for stars, so there's not much work to be done for other bodies.
--Chris