Celestia
Celestia is an OpenGL-based 3D space simulation for Unix and Win32 that lets you travel through the solar system, to the stars, and even beyond the galaxy. Visit over 100,000 stars, 100 solar system bodies, and all known extrasolar planets.
| Tags | Games/Entertainment Simulation Scientific/Engineering Astronomy education |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | Windows Windows Windows POSIX Mac OS X |
| Implementation | C++ Lua |
Recent releases
- 03 Apr 2008 23:28
Changes: Major improvements were made to 3D visuals, including realistic scattering atmospheres, new photometric functions, and improved rendering of orbit paths. Support for the DE405 ephemeris and NASA/JPL's SPICE system was added in order to improve accuracy for demanding applications such as spaceflight trajectory visualization. Galaxy, star, and planet catalogs were all updated with the latest data.
- 07 Oct 2004 23:05
Changes: A brand new 3D model and complete trajectory of the Cassini mission to Saturn is included, so that you can follow the spacecraft from launch through its four years in orbit around Saturn. This new version also supports a new 3D file format for storing higher quality models of irregular objects. The data files have been updated with the latest extrasolar planet and solar system discoveries. There are new scripting commands, extended character set support, and improvements to rendering speed and quality.
- 16 Apr 2003 19:32
Changes: This is a major update from 1.2.5. The most significant addition is the multiview feature, which allows several simultaneous views of an event from different locations. There are also new keyboard commands for handling light time delay, improved browser integration, a more convenient structure for add-ons, better graphics card support, and fixes for some nasty bugs that plagued version 1.2.5.
- 13 Jan 2003 18:15
Changes: Version 1.2.5 of Celestia adds a KDE frontend for Linux, rendering of comet tails, and a host of bugfixes. The accuracy of orbital calculations has been improved to the point where you can observe mutual phenomena of the Galilean moons, spacecraft encounters with planets, planetary occultations, and many other celestial phenomena. Other additions include auto magnitude (based on field of view), distance filtering of stars, ring shadows, and new Web features.
- 03 May 2002 04:01
Changes: Added rendering of eclipse shadows, accurate orbital calculations for major moons, high resolution compressed texture support, big endian compatibility, new camera modes, new scripting commands, the ability to render stars as points, improved 3DS mesh support, and many, many bugfixes.
- All comments
Recent commentsWow
Just.. Wow.
Full screen ?
The simulator is great!
Thank you very much for this project!
BTW: I don't know howto run Celestia in full screen mode.. (nVidia drivers)
Re: Nice app.
> Very nice proggie. Though Earth doesn't
> seem to
> have any texture on it. Other than
> that it's
> quite nice!
Try reducing the size of your window. There seems to be a bug with the Earth surface map when enlarging the window beyond the default size.
(PS: I'll handly reporting this bug.)
Nice app.
Very nice proggie. Though Earth doesn't seem to
have any texture on it. Other than that it's
quite nice!