Celestia: My Very Own Planetarium
As kids, there are certain activities that kids look forward to. These activities include visiting the zoo or the planetarium. I have visited both. However, not all towns and cities have a planetarium to visit. Thanks to open source software, you can enjoy planetarium services at your very own home. You just need an OpenGL-supported video card, a sufficiently powerful personal computer and a piece of software called Celestia.
Celestia is free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It allows you to navigate through 3D virtual worlds. Schools can benefit from this software by allowing students and teachers to navigate the universe (or even just our planet) in the safety of the classroom. I will definitely be showing this piece of software to my high school.
Installation is easy since I am a proud Fedora Core 4 user. Just make sure the Fedora Extras and Dag Yum repositories are configured and type the following command as root:
yum install gtkglext celestia
You can get more information about Celestia from its website. You can download more add-ons from the Official Celestia Add-on Site - The Celestia Motherload. My personal favorites are the Star Trek Universe and Star Wars. If you liked Google Earth you should check-out these high resolution Earth simulations especially the one from NASA. Check out some screen caps I made. Now let me go back to browsing the galaxy.
