Hello fellow humans,
I came here for a reason. I needed a way to picture asteroids' orbits from the point of view of Ceres, with view towards the Sun. A friend of mine who is working at an observatory told me that Celestia could do it. My research led me to this board. I understand there's a difference between Celestia whose development seems to have stalled, and Celestia.sci which this forum talks about. So that you understand that I'm a complete profane in astronomical science...
The orbital visualization need comes from a new free software project, Devuan, which is a fork of Debian. We decided to use minor planet names instead of toys for
our release code names. The first and upcoming one, Jessie, matches the next Debian release. After this one, we'll choose names in alphabetical order from the list of minor planets, starting with ASCII. Unfortunately, Jessie and ASCII seem to be missing from the default Celestia catalog, so I need to figure out how to enter their coordinates into Celestia. One good approach would be to maintain a package of Devuan releases with the corresponding objects, as they're chosen. Ceres (our codename for the unstable suite) is already available in Celestia (although I still need to figure out how to look at the Sun and show the Earth orbit, or more probably find a way to visualize its orbit while also showing the Earth and the Sun).
In the next days I will study a few resources to grasp how to use Celestia (or Celestia.sci?) and create the correct files from the JPL database of minor planets. As I have no experience at all regarding 3D modeling, nor do I get any clue regarding where to find suitable images (if they exist) to simulate the objects I need to visualize, I hope this community can be of help.
In my preliminary research, reading the FAQs and a few messages on this board, I was already overwhelmed by new information and the quantity of knowledge that lie in these... spheres. I apologize in advance for my ignorance and I hope to learn a lot from our conversations.