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Updates:

5/6/2004 Updated some .dsc files with the winzip9-stuff from Mind to ask website
7/6/2004 Updated ngc.dsc with objects up to NGC 70. Now working on NGC 40 texture. Stay tuned.

Main downloads:

To install these addons, just extract the archives in your extras directory. Be aware of conflicts with other addons. You should need to delete some rows in your own data to avoid double objects. If you are a novice, feel free to email me to solve problems. If you are a trained addon-installer, just copy files wherever you want.
Eeeeps... download links are on the images, right-click on them and save files or do your best with download managers...

M45, Pleiads My first work is a model that shows the bright nebulas around Alcyone, Maia, Electra and Merope. As the four stars are at slightly different distances from us, the four nebulas are also on four planes: at 359, 360, 367 and 370 ly. The model required a lot of time, many lost in errors. Please note: all the stars you see in the snapshot are true stars; the textures only covers the blue nebulas.
NGC 7000, North America nebula, bright version When I was 8 or 9 years old, a family friend gave me as a present a 300+ pages book covering all the astronomy matters, from parallax to HR diagrams, from planetes to Keplerian laws. It has been a big crush for me, well written (an italian Mondadori edition) and quite interesting at all ages. The first full-page picture in this book was a red spot very similar to the north american continent shape. I called it North America before reading the explanation: what a lack of fantasy. My second work has been quite hard. In all the photos, the nebula is full covered of stars, giving the texture an unsightly look. It take hours to clean it from big stars and smooth the littlest. After that it was TOO red and TOO bright. The nebula is very big. It covers something like 4 squared degrees in the sky, something like TEN FULL MOONS INSIDE!!!!!!!! It means that the texture right here, in Celestia is too striking. The nebula is very faint in reality, it needs a big telescope to see it. So far.....
NGC 7000, North America nebula, faint version .....I use a faint version of it, in everyday usage. I use the brightest one only for screenshots. Use whatever you want. Try to download both :-D Note: like above, all the stars you see here are true stars, not texturized ones. Sure, you need the big 50MB Hipparcos database compiled by Pascal Hartmann to see them.
NGC 6992, (east) Veil nebula Like above, it needed an hard cleaning. No stars on texture, here

"Minor" downloads: my catalogues

DISCLAIMER: THIS STUFF IS ONLY FOR USERS WITH A BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF .SSC .DSC EDITING, OR AT LEAST ABLE TO INSTALL ADD-ONS WITHOUT PROBLEMS. I WILL NOT BE RESPONSABLE OF ANY LOSS OF DATA
All these files comes from my own installation. Please note that you need to download many files from the web to keep all full functional. THESE DOWNLOADS ARE ROUGHLY TEXT FILES, the ones Celestia uses to load models and textures. All the files needed are made by different persons. Go back to home page to bookmark some useful search engines and download sites. The purpose of these files is to show an almost complete database of objects. Feel free to download and place in your extras directory, if you know what you are doing.
- Make a copy of yours dat, dsc, stc and ssc files and move them out of \celestia
- Don't forget to keep your copy of models and textures.
- Keep all YOUR solar system models in \celestia\models, and YOUR solar system textures where they are (\celestia\textures\hires, medres or lores)
- Replace the files listed in the firsts 6 rows in \celestia\data, if needed (just for comparison, it's also indicated in the description below)
- Copy all other files (from the 7th row to the last) in \celestia\extras
- Put all other YOUR models in \celestia\extras\models, and all other (YOUR) addon textures in \celestia\extras\textures\medres. It is safe. FOR MORE TRAINED USERS: I use 6 subdirectories in extras (dso/messier/blackholes/spaceships/locations/exosolar). You also can do it, if you don't forget to have a \models and a \textures\medres subdirectory in each of them, and put the related objects as needed.
- Celestia, at startup, will try to load the objects listed in the new ssc, stc, dsc, dat files. If you don't display the wanted nebula addon, probably you have to download it from the internet. Please note that I prefer galaxies rendered as grey. If you prefer the texturized ones, you have to fix it.
- If you know of addons (not galaxies) not included here, please contact me. I'll add them in my files.
- If you think something is wrong, or my catalogues are incomplete (as I am pretending that are complete), please send me a mailor a private message in the Celestia forum, my nickname is Duck.

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