General Question Astronomy scenario

[jimblah]

The Astronomy professor requested a scenario with stars side by side separated equidistantly and varying in degrees of luminosity. I read in the documentation that Orbiter does not support stellar systems with more than one star at this time. I've seen a binary system listed in the Hangar and I'm looking at how that was done. Please do not reply with "Celestia" solutions. I'm interested in accomplishing this with Orbiter. I'm not looking for a stripe for this. Just getting my feet wet. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[T.Neo]

Celestia is far better for developing multiple star systems than any zombie-example from Orbiter.

Celestia is far, far better than Orbiter for a lot of things, but of course, if you want to fly a spacecraft around this system- you want to use Orbiter. There isn't any comparison. One software deals with one thing, the other software deals with another. But it would be really cool if Orbiter had some of the abilities and features of Celestia, such as supporting multiple star systems, and interstellar interaction in general.

 

[N_Molson]

Orbiter 2030 - Universe ?

 

[Scruce]

Orbiter 2030 - Universe ?

Yes please! :yes:

 

[jimblah]

Orbiter possibilities only please.

Is it possible to substitute stellar textures by renaming them and treating them as planets with no mass and positioning them in alignment equidistantly from the main (largest brightest star). I need them to stay in alignment and in position for the length of the demonstration. Try to imagine a world without Celestia, and Orbiter is all we have to work with.

If I cant do this in a week with Orbiter then I'll tell the instructor he needs to find someone else who's working with Celestia right now.

 

[Izack]

You can have binary systems in Orbiter by giving one star a very large planet that has an emissive starlike texture, but it looks and acts badly. It has no effect on lighting (which makes flying anywhere near it look very weird) and does not change the system barycenter.

EDIT:

Try to imagine a world without Celestia, and Orbiter is all we have to work with.

Then projects like these will continue to look bad.

EDIT 2:
You're going to hate me, but look what I found:
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_addon_details.php?addon_id=1533

 

[jimblah]

The system needs to be static

and it won't last long. Ten minutes in duration tops. He would like to pan around the sequence of stars, not just at the equatorial regions. Until I read that Orbiter didn't support multiple star systems I thought it would be a piece of cake.

 

[T.Neo]

Then Celestia would be better, it's great for that sort of thing, the sort of visual, pan-and-zoom flying around to look at stuff. It just isn't the physics and flight simulator that Orbiter is, of course.

 

[Izack]

I wouldn't worry about your stars moving. When was the last time you saw a star move visibly? Sure they're screaming along at many km/s relative to each other, but in distances no less vast than interstellar space, all things seem stationary to human perception.

In Orbiter, setting up a system where all the planet-stars begin on the same longitude at the same epoch (making sure that the scenario starts on that epoch) and with increasing orbital radii, you should get a nice straight line leading out of the centre of the system that would last for several days at least of real-time simulation. Even failing that, you could always just pause it.

 

[jimblah]

That was good advice.

My plate of things to do is quickly filling up. If I can learn something by doing someone a favor I don't mind doing it. I will use it later; kind of like code reuse. I just don't want to distract myself from orbiter for the next year. I will email him that link. If that's not good enough than I'll hook him up with the Orbiter solution mentioned. That will give him options. Thank you both for taking me seriously here. I take the Orbiter SDK seriously and respect it a great deal.