Hey everybody, I just stumbled across a great program and thought I'd share.

I'm taking an astrophysics class this semester and was browsing through the Gentoo portage tree in /usr/portage/sci-astronomy/. I started googling the programs available in portage to see if any of them might be useful and decided to merge Celestia.

It's amazing. It's a 3-D model of the universe where you can zoom/follow planets, moons, asteroids, comets, satellites, etc. You can change the time speed, etc. and watch the entire solar system in action from basically whatever viewpoint you want.

From the looks of the website (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/), it's a pretty large scale project, so I'm sure some of you have probably already had the opportunity to play with it a bit. Those that have used it--I'd love to hear any tips or tricks that you have. And for those of you who haven't seen it yet, try it out. It's incredible!

Yes, very interesting program. If anyone interested to run it on SuSE 9.3 here is the link
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/dist...3.2-6.i586.rpm

Yes, "Celestia" is great. It used to be called "Open Universe"
If you want to see something cool:

Set it to show galaxys.

Orient the camera so that you can see the Earth, with the Milky-Way
in the background.

The home/end keys will zoom in or out, hold the one that zooms out
and watch yourself leave the Galaxy! It will give you some perspective.

I hope I don't get a finger wagged at me for mentioning a Win32 program,
but if you want a good intro to how things work in space, give this a try:

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html

BEWARE!, It's complicated and addictive!

I've almost gotten it running under wine, but there are DirectX issues.

Celstia is in the Debian repositories as well as openuniverse,and ssytem.