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Fortran route drawing for Celestia
#3
Here's a rather different approach, which I think might be a lot more convenient, since it's rather small and should be usable by anyone who has a copy of Celestia v1.6.1 or later. It should work under all operating systems, although I've only verified it under Windows 7.

nroutes.celx, provided below, uses Celestia itself to create the route .cmod, so no additional software is needed: neither a Fortran compiler nor Cygwin runtime libraries, for example.

https://www.classe.cornell.edu/~seb/cele...routes.zip (9KB expands to 15KB)

Like routes.f, nroutes.celx reads a .csv file to define the routes, but instead of having to calculate the RA, Dec and distances yourself, you specify object names which are known to Celestia and the script extracts their coordinates from Celestia to create the .cmod file.

For example, a line in the the .csv file specifying a route between Alpha Centauri and Sirius could look like this:

ALF Cen,Sirius,1.0,1.0,0.0, alpha cen to sirius

The names can be any of the synonyms known to Celestia for any of its objects.

A tradeoff is that the structure of the .csv is much more restrictive, and the script does not try to verify that you've entered the correct names or used the right line format. Either the script or Celestia will crash if the data is too badly messed up. In principle a lot of error detection could be added, but I just didn't feel like spending the time on it. Maybe some future version could do that. Or maybe someone else could make the appropriate changes to the script. Anyhow, see the accompanying readme file for details.
Selden
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Messages In This Thread
Fortran route drawing for Celestia - by selden - 08-16-2017, 07:39 AM
CELX route drawing for Celestia - by selden - 08-17-2017, 07:35 AM

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