Making Custom Star Markers
Hi there,
I rember there being a rather cunning bit of software to add star markers in uiview 1.3/5 (circles around specific stars - from our perspective here on earth - to help with night sky shows.
Does anyone know which numbers correspond to ra/dec (or whichever co-ordinate system they use). I have attached one example so if anyone know this would be a HUGE help.
Many thanks
Alex
Winchester Science Centre and Planetarium
Service d'assistance aux clients par UserEcho
The numbers in a speck file are galactic x, y, z in pc. You can calculate them from RA, Dec and distance. There's a spreadsheet on Ucare to help out with this
The best way to do this might be to search for the star you want in the stars.speck file in the star module (or, I suggest, using CAS_stars.mod from ucare, which is a little more complete), most stars have an HD and HIP number as well as a common name, when available. Find the star you want and copy the first three values for your speck file, which will correctly place it in the sky.
Then in your speck file you have radius, I assume to set the radius of your texture, and an orient, but if you don't force and orientation, I believe you can leave that blank and it will always face the Earth.
You should also drop the eval tfm in your mod file, which will reorient your speck file. You want to just have it in milkyway coordinates. Some of the older partiview/digital universe datasets have an eval tfm because they weren't really made in the right coordinates in the first place.
Also check out some of the exoplanet systems on ucare, which include markers, and are a more elaborate way to do this.