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Celestia - 3D Space Simulator

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Celestia is an open source project that provides a real-time 3D visualization of space.It is a free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. It is available for Windows, Linux and macOS 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, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

MAIN FEATURES

3D Space Simulator

Celestia simulates many different types of celestial objects. From planets and moons to star clusters and galaxies, you can visit every object in the expandable database and view it from any point in space and time. The position and movement of solar system objects is calculated accurately in real time at any rate desired.

Interactive Planetarium

Celestia serves as a planetarium – for an observer on any celestial object.

You can easily navigate to any world and land on its surface. When used as a planetarium, Celestia shows accurate positions of solar system objects in the sky. You can switch labels and other supporting features on and off with hotkeys, or zoom in and out on an object of interest, for example Jupiter’s system of moons.

Expandable Content

Customize Celestia according to your needs.

Celestia’s catalogues can be easily expanded. There are many different add-ons available containing new objects like comets or stars, high-resolution textures of Earth and other well mapped solar system bodies, as well as 3D models for asteroids and spacecraft on precise trajectories. Even fictional objects from well-known sci-fi franchises can be found.

Create your own worlds

Celestia allows you to add your own content.

If you don’t find a particular celestial object in the catalogues, you can simply create it yourself. Construct whole planetary systems, nebulae, galaxies or fictional objects. Celestia provides a unique opportunity to interactively demonstrate your creations.

Other Features

Virtual Textures

Virtual Textures can be used to display extremely high-resolution textures or close-up features on planetary surfaces. Celestia only loads the tiles it needs to display, increasing performance.

Audio playing

Playing background music in CEL/CELX scripts for order to achieve greater effect. Available only for Celestia 1.7.0.

Trajectories

Celestia supports different types of trajectory data. Sampled Orbits for example can be used for spacecraft paths, or you can use NASA’s SPICE kernels for various solar system objects.

Installation

To install it, use the following steps:

Windows & macOS X

Installation instructions can be found on their website here.

Linux

You can install Celestia directly from the Software Centre which I highly recommend. But if that doesn't work, you can try following the steps below.

Install a Bintray's public key using the following command:

 wget -O- https://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=bintray | sudo apt-key add -

Add a repository location to apt. To do that, create a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/celestia-bintray.list. It should contain the following content:

On Ubuntu 16.04

 deb https://dl.bintray.com/celestia/releases-deb xenial universe

On Ubuntu 18.04

 deb https://dl.bintray.com/celestia/releases-deb bionic universe

On Debian 10 or Devuan 3 

 deb https://dl.bintray.com/celestia/releases-deb buster main contrib non-free

On Debian 9 or Devuan 2

Run the following commands to install it

 sudo apt update && sudo apt install celestia

If you have error messages from apt that the repository is not signed, add the following text to eliminate the error [trusted=yes] after deb. For example:

 deb [trusted=yes] https://...

For more information about the app, visit their website.

Check out the GitHub project if you are interested in the source code.

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