Touring the galaxy with Celestia
STAR JOURNEY
Space, the final frontier, is a bit too expensive for a short vacation. If a trip to the moon is beyond your budget, why not try Celestia, a free program that brings the galaxy to the comfort of your home.
Hover above the ISS space station watching the earth slowly rotate below you. Be an eye witness as the Cassini probe passes the rings of Sat urn. Visit the outer limits of the galaxy, or pay a visit to Klingon territory (Figure 1). Celestia will take you there! Touring Tool Chris Laurel developed Celestia [1] in 2001 to traverse and explore the galaxy in 3D. In the years that followed, count less volunteers on the Internet have helped to enhance Celestia. Now, Celes tia is one of those rare examples of a program that is not only valuable from an educational point of view, but is entertaining at the same time. Celestia really is fun, and it just keeps on grow ing. The standard package comes with a huge collection of space objects, and you can add additional probes, remote solar systems, and alien space ships, simply by downloading add-ons off the web. Among other things, the complete space fleet from 2001 -- A Space Odyssey is available as a download. Advanced users can design their own planets and fictional solar systems. You can use Celestia for classroom work or work out routes through the galaxy that you can then replay in demo mode.
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.