[Celestia-developers] Three Barycenter usage problems

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

Chris,

I rebuilt Celestia from CVS this morning, Sunday, Oct. 10.

I've been trying to assemble a multi-star system and ran into
three problems related to Barycenter:

1. If one does a GoTo a Barycenter, one is positioned at a distance
of 100 meters from it. This makes reloction using the mouse rather
awkward, especially when using the wheel to back away from the
Barycenter.

Suggestion: the initial GoTo Barycenter should stop at a distance 
of about 1 AU.

2. Star definitions always require RA, Dec and Distance declarations,
even if they're referenced to a Barycenter.

It seems to me that a Barycenter declaration within a Star definition
should be considered the same as the Position triplet RA/Dec/Distance.

Am I overlooking something, or is is just that the STC parsing
code hasn't been updated to eliminate the RA/Dec/Distance requirement?

3. Using the same keyword Barycenter both 
to define a Barycenter position and 
to refernce a star's orbit to a Barycenter
is going to cause confusion when discussing them. 
It already has for me here. :-)

Suggestion: 
use the keyword Barycenter to define the position of a Barycenter
but use a different keyword within a Star definition.

Two possible keywords might be

UseBarycenter "name"
PositionIsBarycenter "name"

Selden