Akr0n August 24, 2012 at 08:54

Celestia

In light of the growing interest in cosmonautics and astronomy on Habré (thanks to NASA and Curiosity), I would like to talk about the wonderful free planetarium created by Chris Laurel - Celestia (or rather, about the expanded assembly of Celestia Extended Pack).
By the way, it was with the help of Celestia that the screensaver was created for the popularly beloved series The Big Bang Theory :)

About Celestia

Celestia is a free astronomical program for three-dimensional modeling of the Universe, using OpenGL technology, created in the C ++ programming language, for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms and available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Celestia displays over 120,000 stars from the HIPPARCOS catalog, allows you to navigate the virtual universe, simulate various events of any time, both past and future. If you have connected 3D-models of space objects, you can create realistic pictures of what is happening, for example, spacecraft traveling, eclipse, and much more. Celestia displays the atmospheres of planets and satellites, moving clouds, shadows from eclipses, sunsets and sunrises, detailed structures of the surfaces of objects, planetary rings, night light of cities on Earth, lines of constellations, their borders and illustrations. The current version is 1.6.1 from June 2011 and the program is developing slowly.

For any object, basic information is displayed on its size, distance from the central object of the system (if any), temperature, and also on the current distance from it. On planets and satellites, the names of important surface objects can be displayed. You can create your own scripts, tours, take screenshots and record videos (which, in fact, took advantage of the creators of the splash screen for TBV ).

For each object, you can enable the display of orbits, coordinate grids for planets and satellites.

You can divide the screen into several parts to observe many objects at the same time:

Celestia supports the add-on system and on the Internet you can find a huge number of add-onscreated by enthusiasts from around the world, but not everyone will begin to bother.

Celestia extended pack

The standard delivery of Celestia, frankly, looks rather dull and specially optimized for weak computers and dialups, and more advanced users should add good textures, models, etc. But, the world is not without good people, one good person created an extended assembly of the program, which initially included a large number of nishtyakov - Celestia Extended Pack v1.1

Full list of changes and additions made in Extended Pack v1.1 for Celestia v1.6.1

Mercury
- High resolution texture changed

Venus
- Changed medium resolution texture
- Changed low resolution cloud cover texture
- Changed medium resolution cloud cover texture
- Added high resolution cloud cover texture

Land
- Low resolution texture changed
- Changed medium resolution texture
- High resolution texture changed
- Changed high resolution cloud cover texture

Mars
- Low resolution texture changed
- Changed medium resolution texture
- High resolution texture changed
- Added low resolution cloud cover texture
- Added medium resolution cloud cover texture
- Added high resolution cloud cover texture
- Added a package of sights of Mars (release from Leserg), which installs 3D models of the following objects of Mars:
  - Olympus volcano (the largest in the entire solar system - the diameter of the base is 600 km, height 27 km!)
  - Askrian volcano
  - volcano Arsia
  - peacock volcano
  - Elysius peak
  - Gusev crater (the research rover Spirit was sent here)
  - Mariner Valley (a grandiose fault on the surface of Mars - depth up to 11 km and width up to 200 km!)
  - Mars rover Spirit

Readme of Mars sights is here: Celestia EP \ extras \ Solar System \ Planet \ Mars \ Mars Surface Features \ Readme_en.txt

Jupiter
- High resolution texture changed
- Added low resolution night texture
- Added low resolution cloud cover texture
- Changed medium resolution cloud cover texture

Saturn
- High resolution texture changed

Uranus
- Changed medium resolution texture

Moon
- High resolution texture changed

And about
- Added low resolution night texture
- Added mid-resolution night texture
- Added high resolution night texture

Europe
- Changed medium resolution texture
- High resolution texture changed

Calisto
- Low resolution texture changed
- Changed medium resolution texture
- High resolution texture changed

Mimas
- Changed medium resolution texture

Tethys
- High resolution texture changed

Rhea
- High resolution texture changed

Charon
- Changed medium resolution texture

Small satellites of the planets:

Mars
- Satellite Phobos
  - Added high resolution texture
- Satellite Deimos
  - Added high resolution texture

Saturn
- Satellite Hyperion
  - Added high resolution texture
- Dion's companion
  - Low resolution texture changed
  - Changed medium resolution texture
- Satellite Titan
  - Low resolution texture changed
  - Changed medium resolution texture
  - High resolution texture changed

Other updates and additions:

Planets and satellites
- Changed rings for Saturn to more realistic ones (for each texture resolution)
- Added topographic map of the Earth

Comets and asteroids
- Catalogs of periodic comets, as well as some bright non-periodic ones, have been added: Hale-Bopp, Hiyakutake, MakNota, etc.

Stars
- The catalog of stars has been updated, now it contains 1016382 stars
- Updated catalog of nearby stars
- Updated catalog with star names

Spaceships, probes and stations
- Added Cassini-Huygens mission
- Added Satellite 1, Satellite 2 and Satellite 3
- Added Salute-7
- Mariner 9 added
- Added Venus Express
- Chandra Space Observatory Added
- Short Space Telescope Added
- Herschel Space Telescope Added

Exoplanet catalog updated (list of known exoplanets increased from 516 to 719)

Modification of the program and tools:

Association with Celestia EP scripts .cel and .celx, as well as links cel: // url added to the installer
The files demo.cel, guide.cel, start.cel, ChangeLog.txt, controls.txt, README.txt and celestia.url located in the Celestia root directory are returned
Program icon changed
In the program menu, icons are changed and added
Minor changes to program dialogs
Added new .celx scripts (from developers)
Added Celestia v0.2.0 Configuration Manager, which allows you to easily disable and enable some add-ons that have bugs (for example, Solar flares)

Extension Lua Edu Tools v1.2 beta 9 (Completed and partially translated the list of add-ons: Alexell and RGV1):

New additions included in this extension:
- Impact Craters Shows the places of preserved craters formed during a collision with the Earth of large cosmic bodies.
- Mars Tour It flies over the most interesting sights of Mars.

Differences of Lua Edu Tools v1.2 beta9 from version 1.2 beta8:
- Optimized LUA tool code for Celestia v1.6.1
- Updated Russian translation

Changes made by the author of the Celestia EP build:
- Added cockpit package (release from Alexell)
- Fixed a bug with FOV, which by default showed 1.01x

The distribution for Windows, 487MB, is unpacked to 711MB.
Torrent
Distribution at Rutracker.org