chuft-captain wrote:
t00fri wrote:
My old Sprite map of the Milky Way in Celestia is retired since a number of years

==>
celestia.SciOh really? Having not seen Celestia.Sci in the flesh, I was not ware of this ... but this begs the question: what did you replace it with? (Prior to GAIA I was not aware of any catalogues large enough to priovide a decent rendering of the Milky Way using star data alone.
CC,
if you have a big, nicely calibrated monitor, then...have a look in the dark:
[click on images by all means and then on the fullscreen button of your browser (FF => F11)]Attachment:
MW_2Mstars.jpg [ 180.22 KiB | Viewed 5902 times ]
Just the Milky Way with 2 million (non-GAIA foreground stars). They are available at Motherlode (Grant Hutchison et al.,
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creat ... _1.4.0.zip) and involve assumptions about spectral properties etc. The MilkyWay is the famous one by
Nick Risinger sitting on a transparent sphere with the Sun in the center. The MW has the highest resolution he has granted us free of charge

and is very accurate )The 2M stars are numberwise in the same ball park as what we can expect from GAIA in the near future!
Or here with
Pluto + Charon:[click on image by all means and then on the fullscreen button of your browser (FF => F11)]Attachment:
MW_pluto_charon_2Mstars.jpg [ 236.75 KiB | Viewed 5902 times ]
Of course there is also an appealing Milky Way template for views from larger distance...
Now that we are an active team of FOUR highly competent developers (
Andrew, Chris( ELChristou), Dawoon, and myself) you will not have to wait very long anymore for the first beta release of
celestia.Sci!. We have stable and fast
64bit versions for Windows (msvc 2015 !), MAC OS X and Linux and use the latest Qt5.7.0_64bit. + Eigen 3.x