Celestia/extras
or to your personal
extras
folder.
When "galaxy label rendering" is turned on, the clusters' names will appear at the appropriate places in space. You can visit those locations to see what stars are nearby. Also, you can "Mark" them so the locations will be visible when labelling is turned off. Some may have InfoURLs associated with them to provide more information.
The selection criteria for the lists of open clusters below were
The lists were obtained using the HEASARC Browser at http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/ and reformatted for Celestia.
Deep Space Catalog file | Description |
---|---|
lynga.dsc (40KB, 18Feb03) |
332 Named Open Clusters (obsolete)
Extracted from the HEASARC copy of
the 1987 Lynga Catalog.
For a description of the catalog,
see "LYNGACLUST - Lynga Open Clusters Catalog," at
|
openclusters.dsc (80KB, 18Feb03) |
610 Named Open Clusters (current)
This list of clusters was extracted from the HEASARC copy of "New Optically Visible Open Clusters & Candidates Catalog" by Dias,W.S. et.al.,Astronomy & Astrophysics 389, 871 (2002). For a description of the catalog, see http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/star-catalog/openclust.html |
![]() Marked Open Clusters opencl_marked.dsc opencl_dots.dsc |
The "marked" catalog substitutes an "x" for the cluster names. It does not use the new "Mark" function. However, this does make it easy to get an overview of the clusters' distribution. The "dots" catalog substitutes a "." for better resolution. |
messier_open.dsc
(6KB, 19Feb03) |
31 Open Clusters.
27 of these are the open clusters originally cataloged by Messier.
Although not well known by its catalog name "Collinder 285", the "Ursa Major Moving Cluster" is very well known by its common name: "The Big Dipper." The entries for Messier's open clusters are cataloged here by the short form of their names, e.g. "M47". 2 of Messier's 27 clusters are listed with their popular names instead of their Messier numbers: "Pleiades" (M45) and "Praesepe" (M44). M44 is also known as "Beehive". These two clusters are involved in what is known as "The Hipparcos Pleiades Distance Problem." The cataloged distances of these two clusters, determined by photometry and spectroscopy, are significantly larger than the distances to their members measured by Hipparcos. The cause of these distance discrepancies is not understood and is a topic of current astrophysical research. These entries were extracted from openclusters.dsc above and "InfoURL" entries were added. |
Celestia/extras
or to your personal
extras
folder. These catalogs do not list the galaxies that already
are included with Celestia, so you don't need to delete or edit
anything.
When "galaxy rendering" is turned on, the galaxies will be visible. When "galaxy label rendering" is turned on, the galaxies' names will appear at the appropriate places in space. You can visit those locations to see what other objects are nearby. Also, you can "Mark" them so the locations will be visible when labelling is turned off. Some may have InfoURLs associated with them to provide more information.
The original versions of these catalogs were developed by Paul Baulch for Celestia v1.2. Paul gave permission for Selden to make the minor modifications needed to make them usable with Celestia v1.3.
Deep Space Catalog file | Description |
---|---|
galaxies.zip
(40KB; 24Feb03; updated 9Mar03) |
Contains the three DSC files listed below.
Since Celestia v1.3 allows you to have several
|
globular_clusters.dsc
(30KB; 24Feb03; updated 9Mar03) |
143 globular clusters
These are designated "Galaxies" for rendering by Celestia.
This information was extracted from Globular Clusters in the Milky Way (Harris,
1996). That catalog has been updated since the creation of the
catalog for Celestia.
Updated 9-Mar-2003 to include InfoURLs linking to the Simbad database. |
galaxies_extended.dsc
(110KB; 24Feb03; updated 9Mar03) |
863 galaxies
These are in addition to the galaxies that are included with Celestia. Extracted from Nearby Galaxies Catalogue (NBG) (Tully, 1988) (see http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/Cat?VII/145) with additions from the NED ( http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/forms/byname.html) and the SEDS NGC/IC database ( http://www.seds.org/~spider/ngc/ngc.html). Updated 9-Mar-2003 to include InfoURLs linking to the Simbad database. |
galaxy_clusters.dsc
(130KB; 24Feb03; updated 9Mar03) |
819 galaxy clusters
Far distant, these are represented by spherical blobs Taken from Rich Clusters of Galaxies (Abell+ 1989) See http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/Cat?VII/110A. Updated 9-Mar-2003 to include InfoURLs linking to the Simbad database. |
Alternate Deep Space Catalog file | Description |
---|---|
galaxies_dots.zip
(45KB; 9Mar03) |
This .ZIP archive contains the three .DSC files described below. |
globular_clusters_dots.dsc
(30KB; 24Feb03) |
This "dots" catalog substitutes a "." for the cluster names in order to make it easy to get an overview of the clusters' distribution. |
galaxies_extended_dots.dsc
(170KB; 9Mar03) |
This "dots" catalog substitutes single characters for the galaxies' names in order to make it easy to get an overview of their distribution: "S" = Spiral, "@" = Elliptical, "~" = Irregular. |
galaxy_clusters_dots.dsc
(130KB; 9Mar03) |
This "dots" catalog substitutes the single character "#" for the galaxy clusters' names in order to make it easy to get an overview of their distribution. |
When "galaxy label rendering" is turned on, their names will appear at the appropriate places in space. You can visit those locations to see what other objects are nearby. Also, you can "Mark" them so the locations will be visible when labelling is turned off. Some may have InfoURLs associated with them to provide more information.
When "galaxy rendering" is turned on, these Planetary Nebulæ will be visible as extremely dim, grey, transparent shells on some systems. Their brightness can be increased by having multiple copies of this catalog in your extras directory, which causes Celestia to draw multiple shells in the same locations. This is just a hack, of course. Hopefully some better representations will be developed by the artists among us!
Deep Space Catalog file | Description |
---|---|
planetary_nebulæ.dsc
(25KB; 25Feb03) |
73 Planetary Nebulæ
Of the over 1,000 Planetary Nebulæ which have been cataloged, fewer than 10% of them have had their distances estimated, and many of those distances are highly suspect. Catalog sources:
Strasbourg-ESO Catalogue of Galactic Planetary Nebulæ
The distances in the Strasbourg-ESO Catalog seem to have some serious accuracy problems: it contains large distances (>2Kpc) for nebulæ that are listed in other catalogs as being nearby (<1Kpc). Also, the fields allocated for indicating the accuracy of the distances are blank. As a result, I was pleased to find the article below. Its authors list the distances of 73 planetary nebulæ for which relatively accurate values have been determined. They don't specify the equatorial coordinates (RA and Dec) of the nebulæ, however. The ESO catalog's coordinates were precessed from B1950.0 to J2000.0 using the algorithm described at http://www.xylem.f2s.com/kepler/b1950.html |
Alternate Deep Space Catalog file | Description |
---|---|
planetary_nebulæ_dots.dsc
(25KB; 25Feb03) |
This "dots" catalog substitutes a "o" for the nebulæ names in order to make it easy to get an overview of their distribution. |
If you don't tell me that something's missing, unclear or wrong, I can't improve it.