Astroblog: Neptunes New Moon in Celestia

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Neptunes New Moon in Celestia


The view towards Neptune from S/2004 N1, with the Moons Galetea, Proteus and Triton visible. Simulated in Celestia.	Orbit of the new Moon simulated in Celestia.

Hard on the heels of Pluto's new Moons, a new Moon of Neptune has been discovered in archival pictures taken of Neptune by the Hubble space telescope.The new Moon, S/2004 N1, is the 14th Moon of Neptune, orbiting between the Moons Larissa and Proteus. At 20 Km across, it is the smallest Moon of Neptune (but by no means the smallest Solar System Moon), and appallingly dim.

Once again I've made a Celestia file for the new Moon.

As usual, copy the data here to a plain text file (newneptunemoon.ssc), copy the file to the Celestia extras folder. Once more I have to update my Celestia Moon tour.
===============newneptunemoon.ssc======================================
"Neptune XIV:S/2004 N 1" "Sol/Neptune"
{
   Class "minormoon"
   Texture      "asteroid.jpg"
   SemiAxes [ 8 10 10 ]

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
   Period       0.9362
   SemiMajorAxis   104200
   Eccentricity   0.0000
   Inclination   0.0000   # Using Galatea
   AscendingNode   327.929   # Using Galatea
   ArgOfPericenter   89.060   # J2000.0
   MeanAnomaly     2.357   # Using Galatea
   }

   RotationOffset       233.6 #Using Galatea

   Albedo 0.063                  #Using Galatea
}
========================================================================

Labels: celestia, Neptune