A Diary Addon for Celestia

After receiving an email asking if a Diary Addon might be available for Celestia, and realizing how simple it could be, I've implemented one. Although inspired to a certain extent by an episode of NCIS, this implementation is rather different. The (fake) NCIS version was implemented using Celestia to display the diary's contents. This version uses your favorite editor, external to Celestia. This Addon is available in the Celestia Web Forum at http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=16719

Modifying StarGen

Despite its name, StarGen is a program by Jim Burrows which designs planetary systems. It doesn't design stars. I downloaded its C sourcecode from
http://eldacur.com/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html and have been enhancing its code somewhat, primarily to improve its SSC catalogs for use with Celestia. I'll be using it to create planetary systems around the stars orbited by Alliance and Union stations.

Downbelow (without clouds)

If they could see down through the clouds from high orbit, here's a view of what Downbelow might look like. Its color palette was taken from NASA's Blue Marble images of the Earth.

(The image's layout is to make it usable for an FHD desktop with icons to the left.)

Return to Pell

I've gotten back to working on my Alliance/Union addon: spacecraft and flights among stars. For the moment, I'm working mostly on models and livery for them, while ruminating about how to make the starflight work reasonably.

Star clusters for Celestia

Although Celestia currently can display Globular Clusters, they're individual objects and not composed of discrete Stars.

Long ago, a Celestian calling himself Rassilon wrote a cluster generator. In addition to defining a random collection of stars, it'll define planetary systems around some of them if that's desired. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated for a long time, and runs only under Windows.

An open-source, scientifically accurate cluster generator, McLuster, is available which uses monte-carlo techniques to define various types clusters of stars. It's intended primarily for generating inputs for the NSTARS family of programs, which are used to study the gravitational development of clusters. For more information about McLuster, see http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~akuepper/mcluster/mcluster.html

I've written a Fortran-77 program of my own, called MCL2STC, which translates the output of McLuster into Celestia's STC (STar Catalog) format.

They don't generate any planetary systems, and both programs are controlled by command-line: they don't include a Graphical User Interface.

I've packaged the two programs together and made them available in
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/files/mcl2stc.zip
It's about 1.5MB and expands to about 4MB. It's so large because it includes Cygwin runtime libraries for use under Windows. I've included the f77 source code for mcl2stc, so it can be built under other operating systems. The source code for McLuster is available on the Web site mentioned above.

The picture below shows two types of clusters generated by McLuster, translated by mcl2stc, and displayed by Celestia. The one on the left is about 50 mega-years old, while the smaller one is about 4 giga-years old -- most of its hot, young stars have disappeared, leaving cooler, yellower ones.



In response to the comment about compilation problems: the current version of MCL2STC must be compiled using the older g77 compiler. It is not compatible with either gfortran or g95. A compatible version is being worked on, but won't be available for a while, probably several months.

EVLA Addon available

The EVLA Addon for Celestia is now available.

I'm not sure if this should count as EVLA v1 or VLA v2. At any rate, it is a .0 release with several low priority issues which might get fixed in a .1 release, which might be soon or late.

More information about the Addon is available at

http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/vla.html

EVLA Addon

Sorry for the long hiatus. My most recent Celestia project is an Addon which portrays the EVLA radio telescopes which are located in New Mexico. My goal is to have completed it by the end of April.

It has a medium-resolution model for viewing or exploring in the Master telescope location. A low-resolution model is used for the other 27 movable telescopes spread out across the desert.

In the picture below, the Master telescope is in the foreground. In the background are the others in the compact D configuration.