Celestia

In the light of the heightened interest in astronautics and astronomy on Habré (thanks to NASA and Curiosity), I would like to tell you about the wonderful free planetarium created by Chris Laurel - Celestia (or rather, about the extended build of Celestia Extended Pack).
By the way, it was with the help of Celestia that the screensaver was created for the popularly favorite 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 more than 120,000 stars from the Hipparcos catalog, allows you to navigate the virtual universe, to simulate various events of any time, both past and future. With the presence of connected 3D-models of space objects, you can create realistic pictures of what is happening, for example, the traveling of spacecraft, eclipses, and much more. Celestia displays the atmospheres of planets and satellites, moving clouds, shadows from eclipses, sunsets and sunrises, detailed surface structures of objects, planetary rings, night light of cities on Earth, constellation lines, their boundaries and illustrations. The current version is 1.6.1 from June 2011 and the program is slowly developing.

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

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

You can divide the screen into several parts, to monitor a variety of objects at the same time:

Celestia supports the add-on system and you can find a huge number of add -ons on the Internet created by enthusiasts from all over the world, but not everyone will bother so much.

Celestia Extended Pack

Frankly speaking, the standard delivery of Celestia looks rather dull and specially optimized for weak computers and dialaps. More advanced users should add nice textures, models, etc. themselves. But, the world is not without good people, one good person created an extended build 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
- Changed high resolution texture

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

Land
- Changed low resolution texture
- Changed medium resolution texture
- Changed high resolution texture
- Changed high resolution cloud cover texture

Mars
- Changed low resolution texture
- Changed medium resolution texture
- Changed high resolution texture
- Low resolution cloud cover texture added
- Added medium resolution cloud cover texture
- Added high-resolution cloud cover texture
- Added package of attractions of Mars (release from Leserg), which installs 3D models of the following objects of Mars:
  - Olympus volcano (the largest in the entire solar system - base diameter of 600 km, height 27 km!)
  - Ascrian volcano
  - Arsia volcano
  - Pavlina Volcano
  - peak of Elysius
  - Crater Guseva (here the Mars rover "Spirit" was sent)
  - Mariner valleys (a huge rift on the surface of Mars - depth up to 11 km and width up to 200 km!)
  - rover Spirit

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

Jupiter
- Changed high resolution texture
- Added low resolution night texture
- Low resolution cloud cover texture added
- Changed average resolution cloud cover texture

Saturn
- Changed high resolution texture

Uranus
- Changed medium resolution texture

Moon
- Changed high resolution texture

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

Europe
- Changed medium resolution texture
- Changed high resolution texture

Calisto
- Changed low resolution texture
- Changed medium resolution texture
- Changed high resolution texture

Mimas
- Changed medium resolution texture

Tethys
- Changed high resolution texture

Ray
- Changed high resolution texture

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
- Satellite dion
  - Changed low resolution texture
  - Changed medium resolution texture
- Satellite titan
  - Changed low resolution texture
  - Changed medium resolution texture
  - Changed high resolution texture

Other updates and additions:

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

Comets and asteroids
- Added catalogs of periodic comets, as well as some bright non-periodic: Hale-Bopp, Hyakutake, McNaught, etc.

Stars
- Updated catalog of stars, now it contains 1016382 stars
- Updated catalog of nearby stars
- Updated Star Names Catalog

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

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

Modification of the program and tools:

An association with the Celestia EP scripts .cel and .celx, as well as cel: // url links has been added to the installer.
The demo.cel, guide.cel, start.cel, ChangeLog.txt, controls.txt, README.txt and celestia.url files in the Celestia root directory are returned.
Changed program icon
The program menu has changed and added icons.
Minor changes in program dialogs
Added new .celx scripts (from developers)
Added Celestia Configuration Manager v0.2.0, 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 (Complete and partially translate the list of add-ons: Alexell and RGV1):

New additions to this extension:
- Impact Craters. Shows the locations of the remaining craters formed when large cosmic bodies collide with the Earth.
- Mars Tour (Mars Tour). It flies over the most interesting sights of Mars.

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

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

The distribution for Windows, 487Mb, unpacked to 711Mb.
Torrent file
Distribution on Rutracker.org