Re: [Celestia-developers] Recent changes

[Selden E B. Jr <se...@le...>]

Chris,

Have fun in the southern hemisphere!

> Before I leave, I will hopefully be able to incorporate your recommended
> changes for computing planet temperatures.  Computing the insolation from
> multiple stars will take some extra work, however.  There's no association
> between a planet and any star except the one it orbits, so finding nearby
> stars requires a search of the entire star database.  The search is of
> course necessary for rendering, but it seems excessive to have to do a
> second one just to compute an approximate temperature for the selcted
> planet.  I need to think some more on this matter . . .


Aren't the relevant stars associated by way of their tree of 
"orbitbarycenter" declarations? 
Maybe a separate database of only those associations
(created at load time) would be useful. 

It seems to me that such a database would include only a few hundred 
stars initially. I suspect that eventually it'll be significantly 
larger (but still contain only a few thousand stars) if people decide to 
create catalogs of multiple star systems with relatively low precision 
orbital parameters.

s.