Celestia
NASA uses Celestia in its outreach program. The software uses facts when possible, and at other times it guesses how the cosmos look using astronomical theory. Celestia doesn't tell you what's a fact and what's a guess, so you may see something -- for example, the sunspots on Polaris -- and wonder if it's real. I think Celestia's guesses make it more useful, not less.
Celestia needs hardware graphic acceleration on most computers. It has GNOME, KDE, and generic Gimp Toolkit (Gtk) front ends, but you need to choose which one to use when you compile Celestia, or choose the Celestia package for your distribution. I used the KDE front end for this review.
Celestia comes with a lot of detail: it has images and data that help render the surface of all the planets and major moons in our solar system, several planets outside our solar system, and thousands of stars. And if that isn't enough, Celestia's official add-on site, The Celestia Motherlode, has more than 10GB of extensions. Some extensions render high-quality images of specific places or spacecraft. Others add planets and space ships from science fiction and fantasy universes such as Babylon 5 and Star Wars.
Start Celestia from a desktop menu icon or type celestia into a command prompt. You start with the view from an invisible spacecraft orbiting the Sun near Earth.
You can get a feel for Celestia by using its built-in demo. Press d on the keyboard, and Celestia takes you on a tour of the universe and of Celestia's features. Or just start driving your space ship: press a to move forward, use the keyboard arrow keys to change direction, and press z to slow down.
Similar to Stellarium, you can press l to speed up time and press k to slow it down. While watching Earth, speeding up time makes the change from night to day happen every few seconds. Speed up time more to make the moon complete a full orbit every few seconds. Watch carefully and you'll see lunar and solar eclipses. During a solar eclipse, I suggest you slow down time to watch the Moon's shadow travel across Earth. You can compare Celestia to pictures of a real solar eclipse taken by astronauts on the International Space Station.
Click on a light source to display information about it. Double-click on the light source to center it in your display. Press g to go to the selected object or press f to follow it as it moves.
Press p, m, and b to turn on and off the labels of nearby planets, moons, and stars. Press / to draw lines between the stars in constellations. With the constellation lines turned on, you can travel far outside the solar system to see how the constellations change and eventually become unrecognizable.
I don't know of any free software educational program that is more fun or more beautiful than Celestia. I wish it were a little easier to use -- sometimes I think that learning to fly the space shuttle is probably easier than learning to fly Celestia's invisible space ship -- but mastering Celestia puts all the beauty of the cosmos at your fingertips.
Windows
The Windows package of Celestia is a self-extracting archive; download it to your computer and then run it.
Mac OS X
The Mac OS X package is a disk image. Download it to your computer, double click it, and follow the instructions in the README.
Linux (x86) Version 1.4.1
If you are running Linux, you should check first with your distribution; there is a good chance that the package is available to you in the format best suited to your installation. A pre-compiled 32-bit version is provided in the autopackage format. It should run on any distribution that has OpenGL and GTK+ 2.6.
Source Code
Celestia is an open-source project. As such, its source code is provided and is freely modifiable and redistributable as per the GNU Public License. Installation instructions are provided in the INSTALL file.
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