Celestia is a free, real-time, 3D space simulation. You can use it to view our Solar System and the surrounding stars from any viewpoint you like -- from the surface of the Earth, from outside the Galaxy, or trailing along behind the Cassini Saturn probe. Half of the fun is contributing your own efforts to improve the environment it provides.
Celestia v1.5.1 source code and binaries are available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21302. Celestia works best on a system with a modern 3D graphics card that supports OpenGL v2.0 or later, although it can be used without one.
Please let me know of any other Celestia related resources that I can add to this list. Send e'mail to seb@lepp.cornell.edu. Alternatively, you can post a message (anonymously or otherwise) on Celestia's Web Forum or use its Private Message page.
Thanks!
Note: The IP address of www.shatters.net changed on Feb 28, 2004.
Note: the following two locations require free SourceForge accounts.
extras directory.
This SSC file is included with Celestia v1.3.0 and later.
Note: the following two locations require free SourceForge accounts.
Note: As of October, 2007, use
The SPICE include files are included in winlibs-2.zip, so you don't need to download them from the VS2003 spice directory.
No DLLs are included, though, so for now you'll have to get them from one of the standard Celestia installation kits.
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Note:
The planetary orientations specified by Celestia in its SSC files were taken from Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac, ed: Seidelmann, P.K. (1992). An electronic preprint of the IAU article with just the planetary information is available at http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/ISPRS/PREPRINTS/index_preprints.html Orbits of planets in the Solar System are calculated by Celestia using the VSOP87 Theory, Bregagnon, P. & Francon, G. (1988).
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The JRE (Java Runtime Environment) should be enough. You probably don't need the much larger JDK (Java Development Kit) unless you plan to program in Java.
VTs of Argentina:
Buenos Aires by Night and Comahue region (Bariloche and Lakes)
http://members.fortunecity.com/guillermoabramson/celestia/
In addition to the notes here, I've been adding quite a bit of information to the English version of the Celestia WikiBook.
Note:
The Addon-Intro Web page is too long to be completely translated by
BabelFish or
Applied Translation.
It is now available in shorter sections starting at
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/addon-intro-p0.html
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See http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/cal_art.html for a description of the differences between Christian Gregorian and Julian calendar syatems and the Common and Astronomical calendar systems.
Use either of these two calculators for dates in Celestia:
The following have no year 0 and thus don't understand the Astronomical calendar, which is used by Celestia:
NASA Object Position Finder, Coordinate Converter, and Separation Calculator
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/Tools/convcoord/convcoord.pl
not to be confused with the Your Sky interactive Web planetarium
http://www.fourmilab.to/yoursky/
Alternate server:
http://skys.gsfc.nasa.gov/
The TIE project seems to have been discontinued.
Most of the Web pages listed below no longer respond
as of August, 2006.
http://tie.jpl.nasa.gov/tie/index.html
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Books recommended by Chris Laurel:
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