Celestia

From OpenEducationWiki

Table of contents

1 Features 2 Frequently Asked Questions 3 Online Support Forums 4 Documentation 5 Mailing Lists 6 Screenshots 7 Links and Examples 7.1 General Astronomy 8 Other Articles, References & Resources

Features

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

Description: A real-time visual space simulation (KDE frontend) Celestia is a real-time visual simulation of space. Choose a point within the Local Group of galaxies, and Celestia will show you an approximation of how it would appear to your eyes were you actually there. Some of what Celestia shows is necessarily hypothetical - the farther away from Earth you get, the less real data there is and the more guesswork is involved. Thus Celestia supplements observational data with good guesses based on models of stellar and planetary processes.

Celestia is unique in its ability to allow you to navigate at an immense range of scales. Orbit a couple kilometers above the surface of a tiny, irregular asteroid, then head off towards Jupiter, watching it grow from a bright point of light into a looming sphere filling your field of vision. Leave our solar system entirely and observe the sun as it fades from a brilliant disk to a bright star, disappearing almost entirely as you head off toward the Upsilon Andromeda system to orbit around its innermost giant planet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Whilst there is no official FAQ for Celestia - this forum posting contains useful answers: A preliminary Celestia User's FAQ (http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2291)

Online Support Forums

• Internet Relay Chat - #celestia@irc.freenode.net

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation is available at the Celestia Motherlode site:

• http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/documentation.html

Mailing Lists

The Celestia Users mailing list gets no traffic and is riddled with spammers. Instead, the forums at shatters.net are active and popular.

• http://www.shatters.net/forum/

The Celestia developers mailing list archive gives insight into ongoing development on the project.

• http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=celestia-developers

Screenshots

• http://www.shatters.net/celestia/gallery.html
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Celestia_screenshot.jpg
• http://cabfst28.cnea.gov.ar/~abramson/celestia/gallery/
• http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/gallery-001.html#0

Links and Examples

• Educational Activities for Celestia (http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/educational.php) - Frank Gregorio has created twelve detailed tours of space for Celestia. Each of the tours comes with documentation and a student worksheet for classroom use.
• NASA's Celestia Exploration Activity (http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/planets/) - The Learning Technologies group at a NASA has created a Celestia-based tour of the planets of our solar system. Click the links on the web pages to visit the Sun and planets in Celestia.
• Celestia Web Ring (http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/ringlink/list.pl?ringid=celestia) - The Celestia Web Ring is a community of Celestia-related sites.
• Celestia Texture Foundry (http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/texfoundry.php4) - Fridger Schrempp's Texture Foundry has detailed, high quality textures for the major planets and moons of the Solar System.
• Celestial Matters (http://www.celestialmatters.org) - Celestia Matters is a resource for high-quality Celestia add-ons and other content of interest to Celestia users.
• The Celestia Motherlode (http://www.celestiamotherlode.net) - The Celestia Motherlode has the largest collection of Celestia resources on the web. There are hundreds of add-ons, as well as a library of documentation and utilities.
• Selden's List of Resources for Celestia (http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/) - Selden is one of the most active members of the Celestia community and compiled a large catalog of notes, documents, and add-ons for Celestia. His collection is of particular interest to more technical and scientific-minded users.
• Jack's Celestia Add-ons (http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/) - Jack is a prolific creator of add-ons for Celestia. He has produced models and trajectories for many famous (and not-so-famous) space missions.
• Mostly Harmless (http://mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net/index.htm) - Marc Griffith is creating an Elite like space game based on Celestia. The project is currently on hold, but an early version is available along with a solar system generator called Stargen.

General Astronomy

• Instructional Materials in Astronomy (http://www.cln.org/subjects/astronomy_inst.html) (some links are broken - see below for updates)
  • Astronomy Lesson Plans (http://ericir.syr.edu/cgi-bin/lessons.cgi/Science/Astronomy) from the Educator's Reference Desk at IIS (http://iis.syr.edu/)
  • http://rip.physics.unk.edu/Astronomy/
  • Astronomy Lessons (http://www.reachoutmichigan.org/funexperiments/agesubject/astronomy.html) from Reachout Michigan
  • Space Telescope Science Institute (http://oposite.stsci.edu/edu_nf.html) Education and Museum Resources
  • Astronomy with a stick (http://www.nsta.org/publications/interactive/aws-din/) US National Science Teachers Association
  • A Private Universe (http://www.learner.org/teacherslab/pup/)
  • NASA Star Count (http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/son/energy/starcount/index.html)

• Emily Lakdawalla's Blog at the Planetary Society (http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000972/)

Other Articles, References & Resources

• Exploring Space (http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/exploring-space-celestia) Article about Celestia in Linux Journal