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The moon in Earth orbit — but not Google Earth

Thank the stars for readers. A few posts ago I was pondering how cool it would be if Google were to come out with a Google Space application, and reader Adam Blumenthal pointed out that such a thing already exists, not from Google, but in the form of a free app called Celestia (for Windows, OS X or Linux), which, if you know what’s good for, you’ll download and check out before you even read the rest of this post. I don’t want to tell you how late I was up last night playing around in this thing.

Celestia is basically a 3D representation of the entire known universe — and then some. With a few simple keystrokes, you can cruise out to and pan around any planet in our solar system, or any star in the sky. In addition, there are models of things like the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around Earth, and various other satellites and exploratory craft that you can visit. Note that the Hubble telescope is in orbit, not just a stationary model like the ones you find in Google Earth. Can you tell I’m excited about this? It’s absolutely boss.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. The Celestia Motherlode is a great, free repository of add-ons for the program, and features a number of very cool scripts that can be downloaded to provide tours of various places in the solar system and beyond, including things like the Cassini mission to Saturn and the Deep Impact mission to comet 9P/Tempel 1.

But wait, the best is yet to come. Celestia supports 3ds models and has some kind of OpenGL functionality. I think the app has been around for a few years now, and in that time has garnered a very active community of virtual space travelers who have taken advantage of the program’s best feature: the ability for users to add their own models to the universe. For those of you who’ve been mucking about in SketchUp, I don’t have to tell you how cool this is. I’m not sure how hard they are to create, but they’re certainly easy to get into the app, and there are some very nice ones in the Celestia Motherlode. I wanted to make a movie of some of the places I visited last night, but that’s going to have to wait. Instead, some screenshots:

Phobos, one of the moons of Mars

Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn

Planetary textures aren’t very good up close (for that you need Google Earth), and some of the models seem a bit flat. But others do a great job of recreating virtual worlds in space. Here, for instance, is the Borg City Planet from one of the Star Trek movies:

Borg City Planet

And here some Borg cubes in orbit around the Borg City Moon:

Borg Cubes

Not bad, right? But how will Earth counter the Borg threat?

The starship Enterprise

One last model. In the post mentioned above I reblogged a a space station someone had plugged into Google Earth that was a recreation of the station in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Well, it’s in Celestia as well — only this one rotates, just like in the movie, and is actually in perceptible orbit around the planet:

Space Station V

Very cool.

Celestia does have its limits. You can’t load information on the fly, which means that creating any kind of real interactivity would probably require an overhaul of some significant portion of the code. But that’s really what this thing needs. I’d love to be able to tag Alpha Centauri or create a collaborative solar system with my friends. And of course there’s no multi-user support. These are not faults with the program, mind you, just my wish list for getting this thing deeper into 3pointD circulation. If nothing else, Celestia could be a great teaching tool. I wonder whether anyone’s using it at the moment. Me, I can’t wait for the avatarized version. Sign me up to be the first avatar in space!