Thursday, July 23, 2015
New Ceres and Vesta textures for Celestia
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| Ceres simulated in Celestia with a surface map taken from the Dawn spacecraft (click to embiggen) | Vesta simulated in Celestia with a surface map taken from the Dawn spacecraft (click to embiggen) |
Celestia is an amazing 3Dspace simulation program. It is expandable, you can add comets, asteroids, exoplanets and more (see some examples here). I use a simulation of the STEREO spacecraft to helpd identify comets in the STEREO images.
Celestia also has a wonderful online community building a variety of different worlds. They have taken the latest surface maps from the Dawn orbiter of Ceres and Vesta and made them into textures for the respective asteroids simulated in Celestia. The Vesta and Ceres packs are here (scroll down the lists of asteroids till you come to them).
There are actually quite comprehensive and use advanced techniques. Being simple minded I just copied the texture files into the /texture/medres folder, then edited the asteroids.ssc file (after making a backup first).
"1 Ceres:Ceres:A899 OF" "Sol"
{
Class "dwarfplanet"
Texture "ceres.0center1.png"
Color [ 0.800 0.745 0.681 ]
As an example this is the edited bit of the Ceres entery in asteroids.ssc
Anyway, download the asteroid packs, add the textures, and you can zoom to the realistic versions of Vesta andd Ceres now.
# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 11:58 pm 
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