Celestia: Teaching at our local public school

Q and her dad have been invited to go into the 5th grade computer class today to teach them and the computer teacher about this amazing software Q uses to explore the universe. (Did you catch that? A homeschooling student and parent invited into the school to teach).

This opensource software is called Celestia and can be found at this site: LINK HERE.

The front page says this:

Welcome to Celestia
... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Here are somescreen shots from this program.

Remember that ALL of these images below are generated within the Celestia program.






A closeup of the space shuttle Discovery in orbit over Florida; this shot demonstrates Celestia's virtual texture feature for extremely high resolution mapping of planets.



The 1989 flyby of Neptune by Voyager 2--last stop before leaving the solar system.
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