Moons of Neptune

[Keatah]

This is more a feature request I suppose. It would be nice to have the moons of Neptune rendered.

[Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab)]

This page has been sitting for ages in the Stellarium Wiki without any resolution:
http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Help_with_Fortran90

[Keatah (keatah)]

I'm not a programmer, just a communication's hardware designer. I would think that perhaps a different approach is needed here. I mean to say, all other programs like StarryNight, Orbiter, Celestia, they all do the Moons of Neptune just fine. Why would Stellarium be any different? S already does the other major moons from Earth to Uranus.

Why is Neptune so different?

[treaves (treaves)]

Orbital dynamics. Each solar system object has it's own very complex set of equations that describe them. The moons of a particular planet may share them, but the set of equations for our moon are very different than those for the moons of Saturn.

Without looking at those other applications, they may have done it very generally. They may use more inaccurate but easier methods. Or they have their own conversions of that Fortran.

[Keatah (keatah)]

How do I enable the additional moons? It would seem Neptune's moon are still not drawn. There doesn't seem to be any info in the config file.. ?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Please reset your ssystem.ini to default

[Keatah (keatah)]

It works! Absolutely stellar! (no pun intended)

[Keatah (keatah)]

It should be noted that when I (many of us users) complain about seemingly minor issues and bugs and matters of "semantics", like for example, how something is displayed in the menu - the FPS/FOV overlap issue [730075] is one, it's really because I (we users) care about the quality and integrity of the project.

This is what open-source projects are all about! New things are tried, they ain't always gotten'right. Big bugs and little bugs show up, get fixed, and the software just gets better over time. I see this methodology in many other open source non-astronomy related projects too.

Now, Many commercial packages focus on the prettiness of the interface and don't add new functionality or fix issues as often as one would expect. And best of all, (you) have good communication directly with the programmers. Whereas in many commercial/retail products, you have to go through a lot of trouble and busy-work and red tape to get your comment heard directly by someone that can actually make a change to the code. And forget about feedback! 2-way communication is next to impossible.

My favorite music player, iTunes, well.. You can write feedback, but you never know what comes of it. Everything is all closed up and stuff. For all I know, the next iteration of iTunes will break compatibility with winXP! hahaha! I guess the corporate mindset wants to hide the "ugliness" of debugging and testing, and that stifles improvements and shuts out the user. That's not the best. IMHO.

Here, with the Moons of Neptune issue, I got an explanation as to why it wasn't done earlier, and updates that said work was in progress, and a fix committed.

[Keatah (keatah)]

So thanks for the hard work. It certainly is appreciated even though we don't always say so.