Astroblog: Mars VMC and Celestia

Friday, August 29, 2008

Mars VMC and Celestia

If you haven't checked out the Celestia Scripts at in the ESA VMC archive, then do so now.

Each image archive comes with a Celestia Script to help you orient yourself with respect to Mars. The scripts do require Celestia 1.5 or better to run (they crashed my old Celestia 1.4.1), and DON'T rename the .celx extension to .cel. If you do that the script won't run (yes, I'm an idiot, yes, I should read instructions first). The scripts are somewhat slow, it takes a minute for the script to load and run on my system.

You will need a map of Mars (like Google Mars) to get more feature names. At the top (west) of the image is the Tharsis region, and the mountain visible is Arisa mons, Vallis Marinensis is lost in the glare of the limb. The big bright patch at the bottom is the crater Argyre, with Galle crater at the bottom. I still don't know the big crater in the middles name yet.

Check out my images on the ESA VMC webcam site! While you are there, check out the images from Riding with Robots.

Labels: celestia, Mars, webcam

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 6:54 am

Comments:

Really nice work on the VMC images. It's amazing how much detail you were able to draw out.

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