Celestia (freeware)

Post by **Tami** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 5:44 am

Celestia
... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't 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 movement 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.
Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

**Note** Site is very slow loading.

Post by **NightStorm** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 6:37 am

Okay, been playing with it. This is actually a really cool program, once you visit the extras site and download some new textures and scripts (which will update orbit paterns and such for various structures, satellites, moons, and so on).
Very cool program, especially for open source... they could very easily be charging $100 for this, and getting a lot of sales from it.