Comets into Stellarium

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi Luigi

Did you try the comet list I put on my web site. Andrew made up a list for stellarium of all the visible comets (127Kb of data) that works in stellarium for those who must have comets.

You will need to unzip it and rename it to ssystem.ini and place it in the documents and settings area stellarium\data

Barry

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by Barrykgerdes

Hi Andrew
Looks OK to me. I think we already have some of the comets in other files but that is of no consequence.

I did say there would be some dups. FYI the "radius" was derived from the H and G values and a bit of maths. This was the easiest way to get something of about the right size.

The file is rather large however and may slow down stellarium on some platforms However I patched it onto my standard ssystem.ini to make a new one with the planets etc (127Kb) and it worked OK FPS only dropped to 9. Filled the screen up with comets.

It's not trivial to cut down the number of comets. The brightness is non-linear, so deciding what would be below say mag 12 is difficult.

It may be difficult for some to use unless they know the full title of the comet.

You only have to type enough to be unique. Prefix resolution works on these too. I made the choice to use the name as it appears in the MPC data. Dropping the MPC bulletin number from the name would be easy. It isn't really of interest to most people. Comet names are not unique so using the formal designation seems the only way to go.

I will add the file to the web site for you and its address will be
http://sarcasmogerdes.dyndns.org/ste...ds/ssystem.zip

The file will need to be downloaded , unzipped and renamed ssystem.ini and placed in the Stellarium user data area.

Thanks. I suspect there are other Stellarium users outside IIS who might be interested. My file only contains the comets, so if you were to strip out the comets from the standard file and put these on the end you'd have an up to date file.

Did you want the perl so you can regenerate the file every month or so? At present it calls wget to get the data from the MPC but I can make it pure perl.

Andrew

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi Andrew
I already use an extended ssystem.ini but it only had six comets in it. I removed two of them but have not identified the rest yet. I just tacked your list onto the bottom and it worked. I checked 2P/encke and sure enough it was there twice when I zoomed in far enough.

I would be interested in your perl program. I think I wrote something in Basic a few years ago to do the same thing.

Barry