celestia
DESCRIPTION:
Celestia – real-time 3D visualization of space
The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions.
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.
A wonderful application to explore and learn about the Universe. It is easy to explore many objects and see orbits/trajectories and real time data, plus real time distances. It is not an ‘artistic’ application, it is a scientific application that is beautiful to work with.