selden wrote:I think Fenrit is asking if Celestia can display the visual effects caused by general relativity.
The short answer is "No."
Celestia does use a highly precise ephemeris for Mercury, so I believe that the advancement of its perihelion is shown (I've never verified this), and you can turn on and off the time delay due to light travel time, but no other effects are included. Light is not bent due to the gravity of stars or of galaxy clusters, for example. I doubt that those effects would ever be included.
Thanks for translating. The result matches my guess.
Generall relativity effects are much more manifest at cosmological distance and mass scales. So Celestia as it is can mostly forget about general relativity effects, while my future
cosmological visualization project will crucially rely on general relativity, of course. In practice it all means that in cosmology the geometry of space-time must become dynamical degrees of freedom for consistency. For that reason things will develop drastically different from Celestia ... That's what makes such a project so highly exciting and different from naive expectations...
Any such framework has to start of course with an appropriate distance definition, the socalled co-moving distance. Lensing and micro-lensing are also crucial effects in cosmology to be simulated within GR.
Bye Fridger
. Ever thought about using Babel Fish? It's actually surprisingly good sometimes.
