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Celestia
Approaching the International Space Station as dawn opens over Russia
I have been having fun fulfilling my astronautical desires lately. If you have any interest in space then you owe it to yourself to download the free, open source program Celestia.
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
I didn't realise how low an orbit the Hubble Space Telescope is in, but then you don't till you are riding along with it. The International Space Station looks majestic racing along above the Earth (it moves so fast!). There are an incredible number of geosynchronous satellites up there. I didn't know Cassini was so far from Saturn at the moment. The two voyager spacecraft are way, way out in the lonely outer solar system. I had no idea Ceres was spherical -- I'd assumed it was the standard lumpy asteroid shape.
But you can do far more than visit planets, moons, spacecraft, asteroids, and comets in our solar system. You can also visit other stars and even other galaxies. Unlike GoogleEarth's new astronomical extension you can move freely around these things and rotate them. Their positions change in realtime and you can go back in time or move forward. It is amazing!
Being open you can add your own extensions, and many people have done so, including incredibly detailed surfaces of Earth, Moon and planets, grand animated tours, and even fictional items like spaceships, planets, and star systems from 2001: A Space Odyssey, ArcBuilder Universe, Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.
I've become interested in perhaps making an animated launch of some of the Apollo missions. And I'm pretty sure the little Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers are not very accurately positioned, so I'd love to find a way to pick up the realtime data from NASA so my rovers tracked the real ones. The models are beautiful. It would be great to get detailed models of the surface of Mars too, especially now Opportunity has started on its exciting journey down into enormous Victoria Crater.
What a wonderful time we live in!
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6289474.stm
A new project known as Galaxy Zoo is calling on members of the public to log on to its website and help classify one million galaxies.
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