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*************************************************************************** * Celestia * * * * A real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in * * three dimensions. * * * * Copyright (c)2001-2004, Chris Laurel * * <claurel@shatters.net> * * * *-------------------------------------------------------------------------* * Celestia web site: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ * * * * Celestia documentation: * * http://www.shatters.net/celestia/documentation.html * * * * Celestia forums: http://www.shatters.net/forum/ * *************************************************************************** CONTENTS -------- License Installing in Unix Getting Started Mouse, Keyboard & Joystick Controls Solar System Browser Star Browser Selecting Objects by Name Known Issues User Modifiable Elements Celestia Resources Credits LICENSE ------- 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 INSTALLING IN UNIX ------------------ Type "./configure --help" for a list of options. The basic commands are shown below. For more detailed information, refer to the INSTALL file. This GTK version is built with... ./configure --with-gtk make make install The KDE3 version is built with... ./configure --with-kde make make install The Gnome version is built with... ./configure --with-gnome make make install If all else fails, try the gui-less version with... ./configure --with-glut make make install GETTING STARTED --------------- 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. MOUSE, KEYBOARD & JOYSTICK CONTROLS ----------------------------------- See the included file: KbdMouseJoyControls.txt. In Windows, you can also use the Help menu to display the Controls list. SOLAR SYSTEM BROWSER (Windows version only) ------------------------------------------- The Navigation menu contains 'Solar System Browser' and 'Star Browser' options. 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. STAR BROWSER (Windows version only) ----------------------------------- 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. SELECTING OBJECTS BY NAME ------------------------- Celestia provides several ways to select an object by name... 1. Choose 'Select Object' from the Navigation menu, type in the object name, and click OK. 2. Press Enter, type in the entire object name, and press Enter again. 3. 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 HD catalog numbers for stars. HD catalog numbers must be entered with a space between HD and the number. Celestia handles star catalog numbers in a slightly kludgy way, to keep the star database size to minimum -- only one catalog number is stored. Normally, this will be a number from the HD catalog, but if a star isn't in the HD catalog the number from another catalog will be used instead. Currently, the secondary catalog is always the HIPPARCOS data set, for which the prefix "HIP" should be used. KNOWN ISSUES ------------ Many people have reported problems running Celestia with Matrox G400/G450 3D accelerator cards. As I don't have a Matrox card, I haven't made much progress on this bug. If you do have a G400, have Visual C++ installed, and would be interested in testing a debug version of Celestia, please contact me. The maximum texture size supported by the Voodoo 1/2/3 is 256x256, so many of the planet textures will look blurry when running Celestia on one of these cards. On 3D accelerator cards with a limited amount of memory, resizing the main Celestia window can cause textures to disappear. This occurs because so much memory is required for the frame buffer that there's not enough left for textures. There are a several workarounds: - Use a smaller window - Make sure your display is set to 16-bit (high color) mode - Try running Celestia in full screen mode Celestia only barely works in 256 color mode. If your display is set to 256 colors, change it to 16-bit or 32-bit if at all possible. If objects look good at a distance but get too dark when you approach them closely, your OpenGL driver does not support a required extension. Try upgrading to the most current version of drivers available for your card. For some older cards, this still won't fix the problem. The next version of Celestia will feature a workaround. For up-to-the-minute answers to some common problems encountered when running Celestia, please view the "preliminary Celestia User's FAQ" located on the Celestia User's Forum: http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2291 USER MODIFIABLE ELEMENTS ------------------------ 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 create an entirely fictional universe, by modifying its solarsys.ssc, stars.dat, and hdnames.dat files. The easiest file to modify is the solar system catalog (solarsys.ssc), since it's a plain text file and the format is very text-editor friendly. It's also quite verbose, but that's not a problem yet. The units used for the solar system data may not be obvious. All angle fields in the catalog are in degrees. For planets, the period is specified in earth years, and the semi-major axis in AU; for satellites, days and kilometers are used instead. When adding objects, they should be included in their own sub-directory under Celestia's "extras" directory. For example: celestia <dir> extras <dir> yourNewObject <dir> about.txt install.txt object.dsc object.ssc object.stc models <dir> object.3ds object.cmod object.cms textures <dir> medres <dir> objectTexture.??? (jpg, png, dds, or bmp) YOU create each of the directories under the extras directory. By using this structure, activating and de-activating your new objects will be easy. Simply move the sub-directory "yourNewObject" outside of the extras directory. Some users have found that adding category-name sub-directories under extras to be useful, such as: celestia extras Deep Sky Objects yourNewObject Galaxies yourNewObject Spacecraft yourNewObject Texture files should be placed in textures/medres, as shown above. Currently, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and DDS are the only formats supported. Models belong in the models directory. Celestia can read 3DS models, and two custom formats (.cms and .cmod). The .cms files are currently used for rough fractal displacement map likenesses of asteroids and small moons. 3DS meshes are normalized to fit within a unit cube -- the Radius field determines how big they appear within Celestia. The stars.dat file is a binary database of stars, processed from the 50+ meg HIPPARCOS data set. The first four bytes are an integer (int) value containing the number of stars in the database. Following that are a bunch of records of this form: 4 byte int : catalog number 4 byte float : right ascension 4 byte float : declination 4 byte float : parallax 2 byte int : apparent magnitude 2 byte int : stellar class 1 byte : parallax error RA, declination, and parallax are converted to x, y, z coordinates, and apparent magnitude is converted to absolute magnitude when the database is read. For more detailed information about creating add-ons for Celestia, please visit Selden's "Introduction to Celestia Add-ons" web page at: http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/addon-intro.html CELESTIA RESOURCES ------------------ Celestia Web Site: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ Celestia User Forums: http://www.shatters.net/forum/ Selden's List of Resources for Celestia : http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/ Celestia Source Code (SourceForge.net): http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/ CREDITS ------- Authors ------- See the AUTHORS file Contributors ------------ Deon Ramsey ........... UNIX installer, GTK interface Christopher ANDRE ..... Eclipse Finder Colin Walters ......... Endianness fixes Peter Chapman ......... Orbit path rendering changes James Holmes .......... Documentation ------------- 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 Other Contributors ------------------ Models of Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey were created by Shrox: http://www.shrox.com/ The Cassini and Huygens models are by Jack Higgins: http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/ Most of the planet maps are from David Seal's site: 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.) The Mars, Neptune, and Uranus textures and Mars, Moon and Mercury bump maps are all from James Hastings-Trew's collection, and the Mercury texture is a recolored version of his. Some of the prettiest planet maps around are at: http://gw.marketingden.com/planets/planets.html Fridger Schrempp produced the '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. Venus's clouds and the textures for Ganymede, Callisto and Saturn are from Bj÷rn J≤nsson. His site at http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/ is an excellent resource for solar system rendering. The Io and Europa maps are by Steve Albers. His planetary maps are at: http://laps.fsl.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.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 Titan's cloud texture in natural colors and its surface map at near-infrared wavelength were created by Fridger Schrempp. They are based on resources available from the imaging site (Ciclops) of the Cassini mission, http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/index.php Venus's surface is a copyright-free NASA image, prepared from Magellan radar data. The original is available at http://www.solarviews.com/cap/venus/venmap.htm The Earth texture was created by NASA using data from the MODIS instrument aboard the Terra satellite. Further information is available from: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/ The textures for the Uranian satellites were created by Ivan Rivera from JPL data. His Celestia page is: http://bruckner.homelinux.net/celestia.html The Hyperion and Enceladus maps are photomosaics assembled by Phil Stooke and colored by Jens Meyer. Amalthea is a shaded relief map by Phil Stooke, colored by Wm. Robert Johnston (http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spaceart/cylmaps.html), and further modified by Jens Meyer and Grant Hutchison. Proteus, Janus, Prometheus and Epimetheus maps are by Phil Stooke. Dione and Rhea are USGS maps colored and modified by Jens Meyer. Tethys is a USGS map colored and modified by Grant Hutchison. The Moon map by Jens Meyer 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. The Ida and Gaspra photomosaic maps are by Phil Stooke. The Eros map is a shaded relief generated by Grant Hutchison from the NEAR laser rangefinder shape model at: http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/NEARdb/nlr/#shape The asteroid.jpg texture was created by Paul Roberts. The lower resolution textures were all converted from their higher resolution versions using Gimp. 3D asteroid models of Toutatis, Kleopatra, Geographos, 1998 KY26, Bacchus, Castalia and Golevka are courtesy of Scott Hudson, Washington State University. His site is: http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/~hudson/Research/Asteroids/models.html 3D models of Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea, Janus, Epimetheus, Prometheus, Pandora, 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 The 3D model of Eros was prepared from the NEAR laser rangefinder shape model at: http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/NEARdb/nlr/#shape Grant Hutchison supplied the correct orientations for the major planets, their moons, and a number of asteroids. Selden Ball deserves a special mention for suffering more prerelease versions finding more bugs, and giving more feedback than anyone else. The MacOS X icon was designed by Chris Alford: http://www.chrisalford.com/ The txf font format used by Celestia was devised by Mark Kilgard. The star database (stars.dat) was derived from the ESA's HIPPARCOS data set. This software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group. A special thank you goes to all Celestia users who submit bug reports, suggestions, and fixes. Celestia wouldn't be the program it is today, without your help. Chris Laurel <claurel@shatters.net> http://www.shatters.net/~claurel/ http://www.shatters.net/celestia/