Celestia is a free, real-time, 3D space visualization program. 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 v1.6.1 source code and binaries for Windows and MacOS X, along with source code for the Linux version, are available at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21302. Binaries for the Linux versions of Celestia v1.6.1 are available in the software repositories of the various Linux distrributions.
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 seb1@cornell.edu. Alternatively, you can post a message on Celestia's Web Forum.
Thanks!
Note: Posting to the following two locations require a free Celestia Forum account:
Note: The links below have been left for historical reasons: Chris Laurel's Celestia site has been unavailabe for years.
Note: the following two locations require free SourceForge accounts.
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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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Section 2.2 underwent a significant overhaul on February 2, 2012. Many obsolete and no-longer-appropriate links were removed. Please contact Selden if you know of any sites which should be added.
Note: most of the files on Shatters were lost due to a system failure some years ago. The link below accesses the files saved on Internet Archive's WayBack machine.
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
https://www.classe.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 two calendar calculators have no year 0 and thus don't understand the Astronomical calendar, which is used by Celestia:
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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The links below have *not* been verified or updated as of July, 2010.
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If you don't tell me that something's missing, unclear or wrong, I can't improve it.
