Wednesday, December 01, 2004

There Are Maps, and Then There Are MAPS.......

........

Jay Manifold over at a Voyage to Arcturus turned me on to what may be my new favorite toy.

Celestia

"Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience 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 travel 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."

How cool is this? It's a complete 3D map of the universe. Want to see what the path of the orbit of Saturn looks like in a 3D view? Point and click. Check out a comet or two, go land on Neptune- point and click. I can't install this at work for obvious reasons, but I can't wait to download this to my home PC. I will download it later tonight and let you know whether it's as cool as it sounds......

Ok, so I get a little astronomy-geeky sometimes. I can stop any time I want. Really, I can.....ok, maybe not...

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