Celestia
Published on 18 Mar 2007 at 1:32 am.
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Filed under Astronomy, Exploration, Fun, Mars, Software.
This semester, I am teaching a course on Star Systems, and I have found the free software package Celestia to be excellent. Celestia performs 3D real-time rendering of the planets and stars with high-quality graphics and allows you to travel through both space and time.
You can watch a lunar eclipse from Earth, and then go to the Moon and see that the Earth is eclipsing the Sun! The local stars are all real, and you can actually travel to them, and watch the other stars pass you by in three-dimensions. It is very interesting to do this with the constellation lines drawn so that you can see that the constellations are meaningless patterns resulting from our particular viewpoint in space.
You can make movies of events, write scripts for tours, and screen capture some very lovely images. There is a web site called Celestia Motherlode where you can download all sorts of addons that improve the quality of the images (often substantially) and have various tours already written.
Above is an animated gif of Mars that I made from Celestia images, followed by an image I arranged of Jupiter-rise from Io.
I should reiterate that it is free and actually pretty easy to install!
Enjoy,
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
