ajtribick wrote:
Are you thinking of the KOI candidates add-on? I guess it has disappeared into the void left by the disappearance of shatters.net. I may have the source code for it lying around somewhere but I'm not sure whether its worth resurrecting now that so many Kepler candidates have been validated.
Probably...
Quote:
---
One thing I'd like to put in is textures, but I feel that the system used by Celestia is due a bit of an overhaul, it's been a long time and there is more observational data, particularly for hot Jupiters. Any thoughts on this, bearing in mind for some objects you may only have one of mass and radius... (maybe also worth considering whether there are better mass-radius relationships to use than the solar system-derived M=R^2.06)
Regarding orbits, I'm thinking for objects with unknown orientation things like coplanarity with binary star orbits (which would make having the stc parser more useful!) or the invariable plane of other planets in the system might be a good start. What happens when the masses of the other planets are unknown?
Well, a few points without being an expert (yet) on EXO planets:
i) As to
EXO textures, a possibly useful and scientific approach could be to use a set of
standardized textures in analogy to
Hubble type textures for galaxies. The underlying idea being to use such a limited texture set mainly for visualizing characteristic sets of catalog data, rather than trying to be individually photo-realistic somehow...
ii) You may have read that Dawoon (DW) recently completed his Master of Space Studies degree at ISU in Strasbourg. The subject of his thesis work was
Visualizing Gravitational Lensing Phenomena in Real-time using GPU shaders in celestia.Sci. Well besides a Prof. from ISU, I was his official co-advisor...
The result from this struggle is a really nice graphical implementation of strong lensing with lenses ranging from individual stars (including our Sun of course or also multiple star systems) to galaxy clusters. What is still missing for reasons of time is an implementation of
Microlensing for EXO planets! This is definitely planned with high priority...
DW is currently in the US working for NASA in the EXO planet dept. during a 3 months internship!
iii) Since for Microlensing there is no perceptible geometric deflection of light we need to first implement the QT plotting tool library Qwt 6 (
http://qwt.sourceforge.net/). It perfectly integrates into Qt (and qt-designer) and offers a huge amount of dedicated plots as needed for a sensible visualization of Microlensing (and plenty of other things!).
iv) Still challenging is the important task of visualizing measurement uncertainties e.g. in form of missing orbital parameters e.g. for EXOs, multiple star orbits etc. The main danger here is of course to mess up the entire scene with uncertainty contours or even surfaces

Regards,
Fridger