#Celestia-g2
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* Celestia-g2 *
* *
* A tentative revival of the Celestia project, a real-time space *
* simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. *
* *
* Copyright (c) 2001-2016, Celestia Development Team *
* *
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
* Celestia web site: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ *
* *
* Celestia documentation: *
* http://www.shatters.net/celestia/documentation.html *
* Celestia WikiBook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia *
* *
* Celestia forums: http://www.shatters.net/forum/ (currently offline) *
* *
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- Differences between Celestia and Celestia-g2
- Project goals
- Program License
- Data and 3rd Party Software License
- Installing in Linux
- Getting Started
- Mouse, Keyboard & Joystick Controls
- Star & Solar System Browser
- Selecting Objects by Name
- Known Issues
- User Modifiable Elements
- Celestia Resources
- Contributions
- Acknowledgements
Celestia-g2 is a continuation of Celestia. The Celestia svn repository https://svn.code.sf.net/p/celestia/code was cloned into a git repository using svn2git (https://github.com/nirvdrum/svn2git) and pushed to github. The first feature which differentiates Celestia-g2 from Celestia is the support of a larger set of JPL DE ephemerides and compatible INPOP ephemerides. The second one is the port of the QT4 GUI to QT5.
At the moment the development is focusing on the PC/Linux platform. Portability of the code is a development goal, however without developpers and testers for other platforms, portability cannot be guaranteed.
The support of the platform specific frontends (Gnome, KDE, Win32...) is currently dropped in favor of the cross-platform QT UI (now QT5).
The main goals of the project is to add features to Celestia. It is also desired to port to Lua 5.3+ (possibly integrating the lua sources into the celestia source tree) and to Wayland (possibly also Mir). NAIF spice source may also be included into Celestia sources in the future for easier installation/build.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details, which you should have received along with this program (filename: COPYING). If not, request a copy from: Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330 Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
The program may come with data (such as textures and 3D models) and 3rd party software libraries which have their own specific license. Refer to their respective documentation for licensing information.
Get the source:
git clone https://github.com/bgodard/celestia-g2.git
cd celestia-g2/celestia
Edit celestia.pro to adjust build options.
Build:
qmake
make
make install
Celestia will start up in a window, and if everything is working correctly, you'll see Earth in front of a field of stars. Displayed on-screen, is some information about your target (Earth), your speed, and the current time (Universal Time, so it'll probably be a few hours off from your computer's clock).
Right drag the mouse to orbit Earth and you might see the Moon and some familiar constellations. Left dragging the mouse changes your orientation also, but the camera rotates about its center instead of rotating around Earth. Rolling the mouse wheel will change your distance to Earth--you can move light years away, then roll the wheel in the opposite direction to get back to your starting location. If your mouse lacks a wheel, you can use the Home and End keys instead.
When running Celestia, you will usually have some object selected. Currently, it's Earth, but it could also be a star, moon, spacecraft, galaxy, or some other object. The simplest way to select an object is to click on it. Try clicking on a star to select it. The information about Earth is replaced with some details about the star. Press G (or use the Navigation menu), and you'll zoom through space toward the selected star. If you press G again, you'll approach the star even closer.
Press H to select our Sun, and then G to go back to our Sun. Right click on the sun to bring up a menu of planets and other objects in the solar system. After selecting a planet from the menu, hit G again to travel toward it. Once there, hold down the right mouse button and drag to orbit the planet.
The Tour Guide is a list of some of the more interesting objects you can visit in Celestia. Select the Tour Guide option in the Navigation menu to display the Tour Guide window. Choose a destination from the list, click the Goto button, and you're off.
That covers the very basics. For a more in-depth look at Celestia and the controls available to you, download the "Celestia User's Guide" (written by Frank Gregorio), available in several languages, from: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/documentation.html This web page also includes links to the Celestia README file translated into Japanese.
See the included file: controls.txt OR use the Help menu to display the Controls list.
The Navigation menu contains 'Solar System Browser' and 'Star Browser' options.
###STAR BROWSER
By default, the Star Browser window displays a table of the 100 nearest stars, along with their Distance, Apparent and Absolute Magnitude, and Type. Clicking on the column headers will sort the stars. The table is not continuously updated, so if you travel to another star, you should press the Refresh button to update the table for your current position. The radio buttons beneath the table let you switch between viewing a list of Nearest, Brightest, or 'With planets' stars. As with the solar system browser, clicking on any star name in the table will select it. Use this feature along with the Center and Go To buttons to tour the stars visible from any night sky in the galaxy.
###SOLAR SYSTEM BROWSER
The Solar System Browser displays a window with a tree view of all the objects in the nearest solar system (if there is one within a light year of your current position.) Clicking on the name of any object in the window will select it. You can then use the Center or Go To buttons to display that object in the main Celestia window.
Celestia provides several ways to select an object by name...
-
Choose 'Select Object' from the Navigation menu, type in the object name, and click OK.
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Press Enter, type in the entire object name, and press Enter again.
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Press Enter, type in the first few characters of the object name, press the Tab key to move through the displayed listing until the object is highlighted, then press Enter again.
You can use common names, Bayer designations or catalog numbers for stars. Celestia currently supports the HIP, HD and SAO catalogs. Catalog numbers must be entered with a space between the prefix and the catalog number.
For up-to-the-minute answers to some common problems encountered when running Celestia, please view either the FAQ in the Help menu or take a look at the "Celestia User's FAQ" located on the Celestia User's Forum: http://www.shatters.net/forum/ (currently offline)
You can modify how Celestia starts up each time you run it, by defining your own start-up settings. Simply open the file "start.cel" in a plain text editor and follow the in-file instructions. Also, view the celestia.cfg file in a plain text editor to see additional settings.
Celestia allows you to easily add real, hypothetical, or fictional objects by creating new catalog files. It is not recommended that you alter the built-in data files; nearly all desired modifications and additions can be made by placing new catalog files in Celestia's extras folders. There are three types of catalog files:
- ssc (solar system catalog: planets, moons, spacecraft, etc.)
- stc (star catalog)
- dsc (deep sky catalog: galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae) All three types of catalog file are text files that can be updated with your favorite text editing program.
- Celestia Web Site: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
- Celestia User Forums: http://www.shatters.net/forum/ (currently offline)
- Selden's List of Resources for Celestia : http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/
- Celestia WikiBook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia
- Celestial Matters Website and Forums: http://www.celestialmatters.org/ & http://forum.celestialmatters.org/
- Celestia Motherlode: http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/
- Celestia Source Code (SourceForge.net): http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/
- Celestia Bug Tracking (SourceForge.net): http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=121302&group_id=21302&func=browse
- Celestia Feature Requests (SourceForge.net): http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=371302&group_id=21302&func=browse
- Chris Laurel claurel@gmail.com
- Clint Weisbrod cweisbrod@cogeco.ca
- Fridger Schrempp t00fri@mail.desy.de
- Bob Ippolito bob@redivi.com
- Christophe Teyssier chris@teyssier.org
- Hank Ramsey hramsey@users.sourceforge.net
- Grant Hutchison grant.celestia@xemaps.com
- Pat Suwalski pat@suwalski.net
- Toti
- Da Woon Jung dirkpitt2050@users.sf.net
- Vincent Giangiulio vince.gian@free.fr
- Andrew Tribick
Deon Ramsey ........... original GTK1 interface
Christopher ANDRE ..... Eclipse Finder
Colin Walters ......... Endianness fixes
Peter Chapman ......... Orbit path rendering changes
James Holmes ..........
Harald Schmidt ........ Lua scripting enhancements, bug fixes
Nils Larsson .......... Qt enhancements
Frank Gregorio ........ Celestia User's Guide
Hitoshi Suzuki ........ Japanese README translation
Christophe Teyssier ... DocBook and HTML conversion of User's Guide
Diego Rodriguez ....... Acrobat conversion of User's Guide
Don Goyette ........... CEL Scripting Guide
Harald Schmidt ........ Celx/Lua Scripting Guide
Supplied the correct orientations for the major planets, their moons, and a number of asteroids and also worked on these data files: Solarsys.ssc, nearstars.stc, extrasolar.ssc, extrasolar.stc, earth_locs.ssc
Complete NGC/IC galaxy database + local group galaxies (galaxies.dsc)
Data base on globular clusters (globulars.dsc)
Data base on visual and spectroscopic binaries (visualbins.stc,
spectbins.stc)
World-capitals.ssc
Asterisms.dat
Significant update of the star.dat base based on new HIP Reduction of the Raw data, Floor van Leeuwen, 2007.
CHARM2 stellar radii (charm2.stc)
http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/. A few of these maps were modified by me, with fictional terrain added to fill in gaps. The model of the Galileo spacecraft is also from David Seal's site (though it was converted from Inventor to 3DS format.)
Hastings-Trew's collection. His maps may be found here: http://gw.marketingden.com/planets/planets.html
Saturn's rings were built by Grant Hutchison from Cassini imaging, with transparency information derived from stellar transit data obtained from: http://pds-rings.arc.nasa.gov/ringocc/ringocc.html
The Eros map is a shaded relief generated from the NEAR laser rangefinder shape model at: http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/NEARdb/nlr/#shape
Dione and Rhea are USGS maps colored and modified by Jens Meyer.
The Moon map is based on data from PDS Map-A-Planet at http://pdsmaps.wr.usgs.gov/maps.html with colors from Mark Robinson at http://www.earth.northwestern.edu/research/robinson/MOON/clem_color.html.
'Available data' Pluto and Charon textures using maps created by Marc Buie at Lowell Observatory. Buie's maps were generated from photometric data gathered during six years of mutual occultations of Pluto and Charon.
Titan's cloud texture in natural colors and its surface map at near-infrared
wavelength. They are based on resources available from the imaging site
(Ciclops) of the Cassini mission
(http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/index.php)
The Phoebe base texture was created from the cylindrical map published by the Cassini imaging team (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07775)
The Tethys textures are based on the Oct 2008 Ciclops map (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11116)
The Iapetus texture was created from the Oct 2008 Ciclops map (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11116)
The Lunar topography and bump maps, using Clementine laser altimeter data, merged in the polar regions with topographic data from Clementine 750 nm oblique and nadir images (ftp://ftpflag.wr.usgs.gov/dist/pigpen/moon/usgs/topo/global/)
The Mercury map was created from a combination of Mariner 10 imaging with recent MESSENGER WAC images from the first two flybys, as collected and reprojected by Steve Albers: See http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html.
Proteus, Janus, Prometheus and Epimetheus maps are from Phil Stooke.
The Ida and Gaspra photomosaic maps are by Phil Stooke.
Bj�rn J�nsson. His site at http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/ is an excellent resource for solar system rendering.
data. The original is available at http://www.solarviews.com/cap/venus/venmap.htm
aboard the Terra satellite. Further information is available from: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
The Io and Europa maps are by Steve Albers. His planetary maps are at: http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html
data. His Celestia page is: http://bruckner.homelinux.net/celestia.html
colored by Jens Meyer.
(http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spaceart/cylmaps.html), and further modified by Jens Meyer and Grant Hutchison.
Andrew Tribick.
The map of Enceladus is derived from the December 2008 CICLOPS map: http://ciclops.org/view/5447/Map_of_Enceladus_December_2008
http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/
complete ISS model with textures by Bob Hundley. The model represents the ISS as of June 2008 and is a modification of the model that can be found here: http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_addon_details.php?addon_id=1199 ISS model of June 2008 (with Kibo) by krisci3 (modified and converted in order to work with JPG by Ulrich Dickmann, a.k.a. Adirondack)
Castalia and Golevka are courtesy of Scott Hudson, Washington State University. His site is: http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/~hudson/Research/Asteroids/models.html
Hyperion, Larissa, Proteus, Vesta, Ida, Gaspra and Halley are derived from Phil Stooke's Cartography of Non-Spherical Worlds at: http://publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/plancart.htm and optical shape model dataset at: http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/SBNast/holdings/EAR-A-5-DDR-STOOKE-SHAPE-MODELS- V1.0.html
at: http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/NEARdb/nlr/#shape
The Phoebe mesh was designed by Jerry Gardner aka Jestr, jestr@ntlworld.com,
based on Phoebe's bumpy topography display from Cassini, http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06070
planetary information, developed by Caltech/JPL under contract to NASA.
Schrempp with Matthew Arcus 'mmps' software, http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~arcus/mmps/
versions using Gimp.
Constellation Boundary Data": http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/ftp-index?/ftp/cats/VI/49
finding more bugs, and giving more feedback than anyone else.
The MacOS X icon was designed by Chris Alford: http://www.chrisalford.com/
A very big thank you for creating Celestia goes to Chris Laurel who started this program in the year 2001. claurel@gmail.com http://www.shatters.net/~claurel/ (offline) http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
Special thanks go to all Celestia users who submit bug reports, suggestions, and fixes. Celestia wouldn't be the program it is today, without their help.
The Celestia Development Team