Hi, All,
mathhatt: Yeah, Celestia allows you to use two default colour/bump/specular maps (I haven't even looked at the bump and specular maps yet!)
One is often an artists impression- and is the one normally displayed- and the other has 'lok' in the filename. (eg: Kulthea.jpg and Kulthea-lok.jpg.)
The lok is short for Limit of Knowledge- as there are still some objects in the Solar System that we haven't been able to photograph from all angles- so the un-photographed areas are left blank in the lok files. So, you could have two colour/bump and specular maps for Kulthea- one that shows both Hemispheres- and one that shows only the Western Hemisphere's for the Players to see, for example. (The normally used maps are usually based on the existing lok map, with some artistic license used for the unknown bits.)
The essaence flows could in theory be done as an lok cloud map- although, I'll have to check that just to make sure. But, you could create additional colour maps of Kulthea and simply add the flows to them, and change the texture used, as required. (The other problem with using clouds to show the Essaence Flows, is that Celestia expects the cloud texture to rotate relative to the planets' surface- like real clouds do. So, you would have to set their motion to zero in the *.ssc file, save it, then re-open Celestia.)
The other 'trick' it supports is *-loc.ssc data files (location files) which allow you add things like Cities, Observatories, Landing Sites, Mountains, Seas, Craters, Valleys, Land Masses and the enigmatic 'Other Features'. The View>Locations menu allows you to check on or off certain features, and change the minimum feature size displayed. (The real trick with Kulthea will be working out where in degrees, minutes and seconds of Longitude and Latitude all the various bits actually are!!)
Vroomfogle: Hmmm, you work in the field of remote sensing/satellite imagery? Perhaps you might be the best qualified person to maps bit's of Earth Satellite images to the Kulthea map...
Seriously, though, I just thought that if I'm trying to create as realistic a map as possible for Kulthea, the best place to start would be to use real satellite imagery. And, as Earth's the only Kulthea-esque planet we've got that type of imagery for.....
Thanks for the encouragement though!
All the Best,
Kevin.