Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / September 2004

There's a very cool (and free!) app I've recently discovered called
Celestia.

 <http://www.shatters.net/celestia/>

It's a 3D space simulator that lets you "fly" around to various objects
in space and see them in real-time.  You can speed up time and watch
the planets whip around the sun, or sit in orbit above Europa and watch
as Jupiter and its other moons fly by in the background.  Very neat
stuff.

It also allows you to go to a particular latitude and longitude on any
body, including Earth, and then you can use a couple simple keystrokes
to go to the surface and change the controls to AltAzimuth mode (so
that instead of controlling things like pitch and yaw, like a flight
simulator, you're turning side to side and looking up and down).  This
way, you can see the sky above your location at any particular time,
and can optionally have constellations, planets, stars, etc labelled.

Even if you don't know squat about Astronomy, I think this would be a
fun program to play with!

<http://www.starrynight.com/>

There also is  a website at

http://www.heavens-above.com/

that does this.

RP

Sure is. Get an app called XEphem.

I am running version 3.6 on my Power Book G4.
Have been using it for years on my Linux system as well.
And the good thing is it's free.

Check it out here:

http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/

And for a look at the OSX flavor:

http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/

BTW it was reviewed in Sky & Telescope a couple of years ago.

file:///usr/local/xephem/help/xephem.html#Credits

Jack:

f you have easy on-line access, try this:

<http://skyandtelescope.com/observing/skychart/article_1220_1.asp#>

Susan K