Celestia
 Celestia is a free
real-time space simulation that lets you visually experience the
universe in three dimensions.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia does not confine
you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar
system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All
travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you
explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down
to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface
makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want
to visit.
Many add-ons and vastly improved textures of high resolution
are available for Celestia.
NASA and ESA have used Celestia in their educational and
outreach programs, as well as for interfacing to trajectory analysis
software.
It has GNOME,
KDE,
and generic Gimp Toolkit (Gtk) front ends.
Celestia 1.5.0
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Price
Free to download
Size
27.8MB
License
GNU General Public License
Developer
Celestia Development Team
Website
www.shatters.net/celestia
System Requirements
CPU > 300 MHz
512MB of RAM recommended
OpenGL graphics card
OpenGL
Support
Sites:
FAQ,
Celestia
User Forums,
Celestial
Matters, The
Celestia
Motherlode, Selden's
List of Resources for Celestia, NASA Celestia
Guided Activity, Celestia
Texture Foundry, Jack's
Celestia Add-ons, Celestia for GNOME,
Celestia
Developer
Center
Selected
Reviews:
Astronomywa.net,
Linux.com,
Softpedia
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Features include:
- Displays the Hipparcos Catalogue of almost 120,000 stars
- Uses the very accurate VSOP87 theory of planetary orbits to
provide a Solar and lunar eclipse finder and to display the orbital
paths of planets (including extrasolar planets), moons, asteroids,
comets, artificial satellites, and spacecraft
- Travel/fly through the Celestia universe using simple
keyboard controls, at any speed from 0.001m/s to millions of light years
- Names and positions of multitudes of objects in space can
be displayed, from galaxies, star clusters, nebula, constellations and
stars to planets, moons, asteroids, comets and artificial satellites,
as well as the names and locations of cities, craters, observatories,
valleys, landing sites, continents, mountains, seas and other surface
features
- Displays features such as detailed atmospheres on planets
and moons, sunsets and sunrises, moving clouds, planetary rings,
eclipse and ring shadows, constellation lines, borders and
illustrations, night-side lights, detailed surface textures, nebula
gases and star flares
- Information about the objects that Celestia draws can also
be displayed: the radius, the distance, length of the sidereal day and
average temperature of the planets are shown and the distance,
luminosity relative to the sun, spectral class, surface temperature and
radius of stars are indicated.
- Graphic screen-shots and movies can be captured in classic
or HD resolutions
- Extended with new objects and there are hundreds of
third-party, user-created add-ons available for installation, both
fictional and realistic
Last Updated Wednesday, April 23 2008 @ 02:15 PM EDT
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