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Author Topic: Albedo and apparent magnitude of planets.  (Read 2329 times)

Krakatoa

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Albedo and apparent magnitude of planets.
« on: August 27, 2018, 11:52:22 AM »
I was looking around in the solar system in US2 and I found out that Jupiter isn't visible from Earth, while in real life it's one of the brightest objects in the night sky.  That made me wonder if it could be possible to use the luminosity of a star and the radius and albedo of a planet to calculate the apparent magnitude of that planet for any distance. This then can be projected as a glowing point with a certain brightness in your simulation.
I have no idea if this would be difficult to implement in US2 or what effect it would have on the performance of the program, but I do think it would be a nice feature to have.