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I couldn't get your link to work, even with revisions, but the view from around Saturn's satellites is just gorgeous.

Perhaps it's not the sole job of future probes to get us better textures for Celestia, but it'll be a nice side-effect :)

For those without Celestia - do yourself a favor and download it! It's one of the best-feeling 'space exploration' simulators I've encountered, and you can't beat the price ;)

Now, all we need is this as the base engine for Elite III: More Stars Than You Can Shake A Pretty Good Stick At.

Why not install Celestia plug in the dates, and take a look. :)

To that I'd like to add that KStars is great planetarium program, and Celestia is just an awesome program in general.

I made a scale model of the solar system for my kids in the field out the back. You need 600m of field. Here are the scales, shrinking by a factor of 1e11 (so 100km -> 1mm), giving diameter and distance from sun:

• Sun (Sol) 140 mm -
• Mercury: 0.5 mm 6m
• Venus: 1.2 mm 10m
• Earth: 1.3 mm 15m
• (Moon: 0.3 mm 0.04m from Earth)
• Mars: 0.7 mm 23m
• Jupiter: 14.3 mm 78m
• Saturn: 12.1 mm 142m
• Uranus: 5.1 mm 287m
• Neptune: 5.0 mm 450m
• Pluto: 0.2 mm 591m
• AlphaC-A: 167 mm 4,200 km
• Sirius: 249 mm 8,600 km
• Betelgeuse: 37 m 427,200 km
• Milky Way: 100,000,000 km

And it's fantastic!! You make the planets out of blu-tac or dough. It's great making the tiny ones - you're making a sphere 0.2mm across! - you roll out a thin hair of material and cut it with a knife. Jupiter's about the width of my thumb. You put little rings on the ringed planets. And you use a balloon for the Sun. Then you pace out the positions, and place them on the path, with a little marker so you can see where they are. Combine this with a good play with Celestia, and you're talking about some pretty scarily educational stuff. Celestia's fantastic, but the exponential speed control (though totally necessary) means that you can't get a perspective on size and distance.

Then you reveal (from UK) that the nearest star is in New York! (actually, that's a bit far, Cairo is a better match), and Sirius (which they know) is in San Francisco...

And look at Betelgeuse! - it's HUGE! - twice the size of our house - and it's about where the moon is. And the Milky Way ... well, it all gets abstract again. But it's interesting to stand at Pluto, look towards the Sun, close your eyes a bit, and imagine that you're on the edge of an empty ball with the Sun at the centre. And then turn around, and there's nothing else before America... just emptiness....

Pretty good.

And what's weird is that so few people have any sense of scale here - my wife figured that Alpha Centauri would be in a town a few km away.

I guess that this big model they're making is a PR stunt - it raises awareness, and gets people to play with things like Celestia. After all, they seem to be trying to create a memorable impression and a sense of distributed ownership ("We own Jupiter") rather than actually draw the big picture.

You can also boldly go where no man has gone before from the comfort of your own home and your chair, and the vicinity of your refridgerator and assorted beverages, with Celestia, a real-time 3D space simulator.

Looks like I'll need to download a patch for Celestia, the excellent GPL'ed 3D solar system/galaxy simulator.

On a related note, I'd love to see some details such as this (i.e. view from Spirit, etc) integrated into it. I wonder how much space (no pun intended) to integrate GIS data into it? I'd be kinda neat to fly from Alaska to the Spirit rover, and since it is unlikely I'll get to do that for real, this is the next best thing.

-cp-

Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets!

Somehow, I doubt it. Just a little perspective. Based on the current position of Earth and Mars:

Distance from Earth to the closest star in Orion (HD 30652): 26.176 lightyears

Distance from Earth to Mars: 0.0000278306 lightyears.

So, the distance from Earth or Mars is 0.00010632% the distance from Earth to 30652.

Basically, we're so damned far from Orion that, no matter where you were in the *solar system*, it would probably look the same.

Incidentally, if you want to check this out for yourself (ie, look at the constellations from orbit around Mars), and you have a hardware-accelerated 3D card, I would highly recommend trying out Celestia, a very impressive space simulator

One of those universe/solar system simulations - I forget the name.
Possibly because there's more than one name to forget... (=

Let's see, for general touring around the Solar system and neighborhood, there's nothing quite like Celestia. Hours of fun, and very pretty to look at.
Noctis is also similar, but set in a fictional universe.
For more pretty pictures, but less interactivity, see The Solar Journey homepage or the Solar System Simulator. Also The Nine Planets for Kids.
Naturally, kids aren't that interested in just flying around. Well, Orbit lets them blow each other up in space, but with realistic physics and visuals. Once that gets boring, you can let them fly a space shuttle to the ISS with Orbiter. Beware, though. Orbiter is no simple game - you actually need to know how space flight works. There's also the Microsoft Space Simulator, which Orbiter has more or less superseded.

If you're not looking to get that far off the ground, FlightGear's an excellent flight simulator in which you can fly everything from the original Wright Brothers' craft right up to concept superplanes.

More links, mainly astronomy related, here, here, here, here, and here.

Finally, you might wish to try browsing the Tucows Games site and Freshmeat's game section (you'll need to login to make full use of Freshmeat).

Good luck, have fun searching.

... so I can make a normalmap out of it, dump it into Celestia and watch it bring my computer to a screeching halt.

Talk about fun!

I first noticed these jack-o'-lantern faces on the propellant tanks of the cruise stage while taking a look at the craft with Celestia, and at first I was thinking it was just some humour on the part of the person creating the skin for Celestia. But then I saw the picture linked to above, and obviously it wasn't just the programmer having a lark. I haven't been able to find anything on the Web about who came up with the idea, and why, though. I've developed a pet theory of my own, which would be that they needed a certain amount of dark surface on the gold-foil-wrapped tanks to maintain the proper thermal balance, and decided to do something more catchy than just a big bulls-eye dot on them or something like that.

Anyway, anybody know just what the real story is, and whodunnit?

that program makes some great pictures

I would love to watch with my son as these craft approach and land on Mars in real time! Currently, we enjoy doing fly-bys between Mars' and moons, the ISS and Hubble, and the stars, but this would be more memorable than watching videobites after the fact on CNN. TIA.

Is it me, or in this webcam view here of the ESA command center, are they running Celestia on the large monitor just right of center? Because, it looks just like it does on my Mac...

No surprise, this eclipse ties into this set of beliefs. See the site here, which goes into it in far more detail than I would ever care to know about it now.

On the other hand, if you cannot get to see the eclipse, you can use a program like Celestia to see it virtually in your own computer. A very pretty program.

AC.

Here you go.

Is he new? In 10 years there will be applications SCREAMING for it because they use complex models, 3d rendering and high definition graphics and video. Not just games. Poster below me mentions celestia which is a perfect example of a program developing a pretty much insatiable appetite for computing resources.

Longhorn delayed until 2006, longhorn server until 2007.. Microsoft will have to move to 64 bits before the end of the decade. Otherwise people will move to OSX or linux.

Outside of Office software, Audacity is a great free audio editor

SciTE or the java-based Jedit are good text editors.

The GIMP is a good image editor, available here for Windows.

Mozilla or one of its components for mail/web browsing

For media playing you might want to try Zinf (formerly FreeAmp), Foobar2000 (nice light weight music player), WinAMP for Windows. MPlayer is a good video player for Linux (and Windows) and XMMS is a capable music player for Linux.

Celestia is a nice space exploration program.

Jabber is good for instant messaging or Trillian or GAIM if you need to chat on MSN, AIM, ICQ etc.

GNUCash is a capable accounting program.

Oh yeah, and for email, I suggest setting up an IMAP server on an old machine and using that to store your email. This can be quite difficult, though allows you to browse your email from Linux and Windows. Thunderbird is rock solid and good even though only in the early stages of development.

Download and run celestia, the 3D space simulator. It has a pretty model of Galileo in it; fly over to it and you'll get a pretty good idea of its orbit and how things look from its point of view.

Now you can virtually travel in a 3D space environment, i've seen this news on newsforge, tried it out, and it was very interesting stuff :)

You can go to the planet/star you want,at the time you want, travelling in a 3D/openGL system showing stars, comets, constellations, ... The software is called celestia
Celestia link

Also you can get a nice map of the stars using Skymap Link
And it runs under wine :)

Those are both great software you have to try out if you are interested in space/stars/...

I try to keep the number of installed programs to a minimum, like say half a dozen, maybe a dozen.

Err, yeah, right. Let me count the apps that I absolutely *need* in order to do my job.

Things from your list:
* SSH client. Yep, agree with that one
* Web browser / email client (one program)

OK, that's two. What I also need:
* Other web browsers, for compatibility testing
* Graphics editor (for designing web sites)
* Text editor (for editing web sites and programs)
* Word processor (for writing letters & other
documentation that'll need printing)
* Spreadsheet (for doing occasional organisational
tasks)
* C++ compiler (for the obvious)
* Java compiler (ditto)
* Version control system front end
* Various 'back end' admin systems for web sites
that I manage
* Antivirus software (I sometimes send compiled
programs directly to clients; company policy is
scan-before-send).
* CD writing software

OK, that's 13 absolute essentials. Then there are the things I'd find it hard to live without:

* File sharing client. Currently only one although in the past I've used more than one at once.
* Media players. Winamp, MS media player, Real One.
* Productivity utilities: file compression, a fast image viewer, a task scheduler & reminder program
* Video editing & conversion software in order to be able to stick my home videos onto VCD.
* Things that I'm playing with. The odd piece of free-software-du-jour that I might find useful and have downloaded recently to see if its any good.

That makes 24. It doesn't include any of my own projects (which probably adds a further 10 separate programs to that figure at any one time).

And, I haven't had any problems with my Windows 2000 system since I installed it 9 months ago. I don't think I'm "insane". I'm just trying to use my computer as the tool that I want it to be.

Just a small URL correction. :-)

That's a very old version of Celestia, built in the days when g++ was much less picky about certain C++ constructs. Go get version 1.3.0 from here.

--Chris

Users of Celestia (the stunning open-source galaxy simulator) can verify this and a whole lot of other space events as Mars is, at August 27, 0.373 AU from Earth. When I'm typing this, Mars seems to be 0.410 AU from Earth.

1 AU = 149,597,870.691 km

0.373 AU = 55800005 km
0.410 AU = 61335126 km

The values seem to be slightly off (by around 1%) when compared to the article's shortest distance, from the approximated planetary orbits.

If you dig the Shuttle Simulator, you also need to try Celestia (solar system/outer space simulator)

If you have a decent 3D graphics card and an interest in unmanned space exploration, you should download Celestia:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

It runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X . . . Then, install one of the many spacecraft add-ons here:

http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/

Images are here:
http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/browseima ges/mer.htm

One add-on features a detailed model of the Mars rovers in interplanetary cruise configuration, together with two proposed trajectories for each rover. Add a high-resolution (8k x 4k) texture and bump map for Mars, and you'll have a very detailed and accurate simulation of the Mars missions. We're still trying to get trajectory data from the ESA so that we can make an add-on for the Mars Express mission.

--Chris

One word: Celestia

For those of you who are interested, Celestia is an Open Source application that can simulate the movements of the planets in 3d and generate some really cool pictures. It's available for Linux, Win32, and MacOSX.

One particularly good gallery is the Celestial Phenomina one by "Calculus." An example of a cool image is Saturn transit of the Sun as seen from Uranus in 2669.

For those of you who are interested, Celestia is an Open Source application that can simulate the movements of the planets in 3d and generate some really cool pictures. It's available for Linux, Win32, and MacOSX.

One particularly good gallery is the Celestial Phenomina one by "Calculus." An example of a cool image is Saturn transit of the Sun as seen from Uranus in 2669.

For those of you who are interested, Celestia is an Open Source application that can simulate the movements of the planets in 3d and generate some really cool pictures. It's available for Linux, Win32, and MacOSX.

One particularly good gallery is the Celestial Phenomina one by "Calculus." An example of a cool image is Saturn transit of the Sun as seen from Uranus in 2669.

Yeah! I've been playing with it for a couple of months now. Lots of fun, and there are lots of mods/add-ons for it, too: here and here!

Enjoy!

More info is here.

And while you're at it, you may want to check out Celestia, a 3D space simulator.

At the risk of looking like a blatent karma-whore, this would make a great source for real time celestia texture maps!!!

...how long it will take for these moons to appear in Celestia.

Quaoar and 2002 MN were added only a few days after being discovered.

Coolest thing about the plaque is the illustration with the numbers 4 and 5 on it-- the position of the sun with respect to nearby pulsars and the center of the galaxy.

You can see this illustration (or something very similar) for yourself by firing up Celestia, turning "draw constellations" on, then setting your orientation to earth or sun and zooming out to galaxy level or so-- Cool eh? It draws lines from each of the constellations to the center of the view and looks strikingly similar to the plaque's illustration :) I would even venture to say that it is the same illustration that is on the plaque but I can't confirm this- can anyone else?

e.g. are there any good free astronomy programs for windows? And are they just as freely available?

Celestia

I'm a little bitter they didn't have that in my school when I was a tyke.

That aside, I wonder when the folks working on Celestia will release an update to display the new moon in the space similator.

It deserves as much press time and attention as possible.

Also, the inclusion of Celestia is a great move to demonstrate the possibilities of OSS.

A while back I tried to get a view like this up in Celestia - I was trying to see what the eclipse I saw looked like from space (I was in Noyon in 1999 - not my article; I didn't make it onto the train this guy describes, people were climbing in the windows! so I had to taxi it cross-country)

Anyhoo, I couldn't get it to work, even though I can see eclipses on eg Jupiter no bother at all. Anyone know the settings that would show this one, from say, behind ISS?

-Baz

Also, I have to mention Celestia, a great Space Simulator, similar to OpenUniverse.

In closing, let me say that I think people should take more of an interest in astronomy, as the understanding and exploration of space is one of the most important goals humans should have if they wish to survive longer 500 million years or so.

Really there was no point in rolling back time at all, with the accuracy we're talking about it seems obvious that this ancient quark traveler would likely have been guided toward us by the graviational lens that is the mass of the LMC. That, or some unknown process in the LMC could conceivably have generated the strange stuff. Of course at a velocity of only .0015c it would have passed the LMC around 120 million years ago.

It seems pretty hard to say where it came from especially with this one piece of information, but we might very well be in for some surprises if we get enough seismic data in the future to plot against the COBE map!

Some interesting links here.

How come I can't get Celestia to show the correct phase and ring shadow at the same time, to look the same as this photo?

And: How phreaking kewl is it that we can view recent probe photos and have FREE (as in beer) software to simulate those photos? Wow.

M@

Celestia is a 3D space simulator much like OpenUniverse. It's avaible for both Windows and *nix OSes. In it, you can view all the planets, some moons, asteroids, and a fair number of stars. Here's a shot of Almathea. They release add-ons every now and then-- you can even download the recently discovered Quaoar!

I have a hard time talking about Mars or any other space-related topic now and not thinking about Celestia, which I installed on my Linux-based-laptop last night and spent hours using to explore the solar system, nearby stars and distant galaxies. It's a breath-taking display of what computers should be all about, and IMHO should be a tool in every grade school and high school in the country, which is then used to generate the next wave of Mars and near-solor-system exploration interest!

Check it out, and enjoy!

Celestia has to be some of the most awesome software Ive ever used. You can navigate the cosmos and it looks absolutely incredible! This would be a program I would use to show people how cool OSS is.

Who needs "space art" when you can see the real thing with Celestia? ..Reason alone to install Linux.

Cheers,

Celestia is pretty shweet too... not an astronomy package, but an OpenGL virtual universe that you can fly around in... scriptable so you can record demo movies, etc. Check it out!

Looks very cool. It also looks very similar to Celestia, a free app which also uses OpenGL to do its thing. Since they both ultimately use the same information---the 3-D location of the stars in the Milky Way---I wonder if you could just plug the Partiview database into Celestia? In fact, I wonder if the databases are appreciably different?