Celestia

Does anyone use Celestia? It looks good on my notebook.

 

You should try Eve Online lol

 

Ermmm ... not being a wannabe trainee Jedi, I was more interested in scientific astronomical freeware. Some of this stuff is great for educational purposes.

However, you may appreciate this.

 

yes i use it it is downright incredibly beautiful.

 

You must be thinking of SWTOR..which also happens to be a craptastic game, just like EVE Nice find with Celestia, it looks nice here as well.

 

I first downloaded it about a year ago (it may have been the Portable Apps version) but I'm pretty sure it supposedly ran better on XP in those days than on Vista or Win 7. As you can see, it is running well on my Vista notebook. Does it run well on Win 7? They don't mention Win 7 in their PDF (they say it now runs well on Vista). I'd ask on their forums but apparently, joining the Celestia forum, is a bit like joining the Freemasons. I'm sure they'll get back to me soon with a silly handshake. In the meantime I'll have to wait.

 

yeah working fine on windows 7 ultimate on my desktop and also great looking on my laptop running windows 7 pro.

 

OK thanks.

 

I've never played but it's apparently just a giant space universe type thing lol I figured they have that similar premise =p

 

Oh ... that giant space universe type thing ... do NASA, ESA & UKSA know about this?

 

Yeah, I'm probably a bit too old to really enjoy craptastic online games. I like Weird Al's Dobro though, a neat trick being able to pick it up just using the force. So, have you downloaded Celestia?

 

Yes, I went to some star and now I'm lost >_> lol

edit: Ok, now I have the hang of it lol pretty cool.

 

Lost in space? "Danger, danger Will Robinson". Sorry, I couldn't resist that.

I'm a bit of a noob with Celestia, even though I have experimented with it before. Apparently it really does work on Win 7.

 

OK, so I thought I'd have a look at the Mir Space Station. It's in the Solar System Browser. I just couldn't see it. Then I realised Mir was history 1986 - 2001 I believe. So I turned the clock back to 2001.




Cool or what?

 

Cassini/Huygens 24/12/04 en route to Titan to deploy the Huygens probe.

 

is this similar to Stellarium?

can it be used like Stellarium to find out what can be seen at night in your night sky?

 

They are different in many ways but seem to complement each other. It isn't really a planetarium like Stellarium, more a virtual galaxy. You can get a lot of information about various stars that you 'visit'. The solar system is set to realtime so the planets are in the positions that they are in real life, not unlike Stellarium. You can, of course, change the time like I had with the above picture of Cassini on its way to deploy the Titan probe on December the 25th 2004. Celestia can also make videos of what's on the screen, although the file formats are a bit heavy I think. Just by pressing F10 you can take a jpeg of what's on the screen as well. I only discovered that a few days ago!



Download it & give it a try.



Celestia Download

 

tnx dave.

there's a portable version as well!

 

Yes, I've used it in education. It looks really good on an interactive white board. Although I've been told on their forums that it's pretty portable anyway. IDK about that though. The Portable Apps version is pretty good.

 

To use for charts I really like Cartes du Ciel. It's also open source. Not as pretty as Stellarium (but does have some good photos and things available), but quick, easy, and lighter weight. I use it most of the time as it does pretty much everything I want.
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/start

 

tnx m8, well appreciated!

 

I remember that I had used it in Ubuntu 2 or 3 years ago. Not bad at all

 

I use both, I like Stellarium because I can set it to my location get a fairly good map of what appears in the sky from the horizon up. Only wish it could turn out the lights around here.