This Addon is for Celestia v1.5.0 prerelease3 or later. It provides a 3D model of a balloon-borne gas-Cherenkov gamma-ray teleseope.
Celestia is a free, real-time, 3D space simulation. You can use it to view our Solar System and the surrounding stars from any viewpoint you like -- from the surface of the Earth, from outside the Galaxy, or trailing along behind the Cassini Saturn probe. Half of the fun is contributing your own efforts to improve the environment it provides. Celestia runs best on a computer that includes a 3D graphics card, but it'll also work on a computer that does not have one.
More information about Celestia is available at the official Celestia Web page at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ or Selden's unoffical page at http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/index.html.
To learn how to install Celestia and to look at a panorama, please visit the Web page http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/novice-panorama.html.
This Addon shows a balloon-borne gas-Cherenkov telescope observing the Crab Nebula from an altitude of 100,000 feet above Palestine, Texas. The exernal skin has been made translucent in this model so you can see the internal structure of the telescope. The actual telescope was enclosed in a bag composed of fiberglas cloth and an opaque layer of neoprene rubber.
![]() "Gamma-Ray telescope observing the Crab Nebula" |
![]() looking up into the telescope |
If you restore this Zip file into Celestia's Extras directory, it should recreate all of the directories and files necessary for it to work with Celestia v1.5.0pre3 or later.
The included HTML (Web) file contains Cel:// URLs which will take you to viewpoints around the telescope.
This model of the telescope is incomplete. Many details have been omitted and some aren't quite right. Unfortunately, I'm unlikely to be able to spend much time on it in the near future, so I'm making it available as-is.
The original telescope design was the result of the efforts of a team of researchers led by Ken Greisen. It included D. Koch, S. E. Ball, Jr., M. Campbell, J. P. Delvaille, K. Greisen, B. McBreen, G. G. Fazio, D. R. Hearn, and H. F. Helmken. One of the publications describing it is "Performance of a gas-Cherenkov gamma-ray telescope", Nuclear Instruments and Methods, Volume 108, Issue 2, 15 April 1973, Pages 349-353
This Addon for Celestia was created by Selden Ball and is copyright © July, 2007. All rights reserved.
This Addon may be freely redistributed for educational purposes. All models and included documents were created entirely by the author. They may not be used for any commercial benefit without explicit written permission from the author.
If you don't tell me that something's missing, unclear or wrong, I can't improve it.