Celestia is a great multi-platform 3D astronomy program that allows the user to tour the solar system and universe. It should be useful in the museum; and we may be able to do a kiosk with it. I encourage everyone to install it, play with it, and see what we can do with it. The user can write scripts for custom demos; and I put one together that does a mini tour the solar system. It looks nice on a PC with good graphics capability. It is posted for download on this Celestia page and last updated Dec. 22, 2004: http://mhpcc.tripod.com/celestia/

Other custom scripts are available on the web with several listed in the forum on the main Celestia site. Here's some links to good ones from there:

Complete tour of the solar system, planets and moons: http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3713

Space Opera: http://www.midiworld.org/AuReality/celestia/scripts/

Celestia kiosk

Using Window Maker in Linux, as explained on the Kiosk Mode page, you can set up a computer to start with Celestia running a script in full screen mode; but the .cel script will stop running at the end of the script. It needs an automatic restart at the end to make it useful. You can imbed a .cel script in a .celx script to put it into a continuous loop to accomplish this. The code is on the Celestia forum at this link: http://www.shatters.net/forum/ When invoked from a command line, Celestia can be passed the name of a .CEL or .CELX script to run at startup: Code: celestia --url name-of-script.cel

I have installed Celestia in Suse 9.1, Red Hat 9, and Windows 98 SE; and it works great. The main site is: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ . The Suse rpm is available through Yast. The Red Hat rpm is available at: http://freshrpms.net/ . It needs gtkglarea which I got with apt/synaptic; and it's also on the second Red Hat 9 CD. Note that to run .celx scripts, you will probably have to compile Celestia from source and configure --with-kde --with-lua.

For the kde version, you need the kde software development package installed. I got a Qt error with ./configure --with-kde until I did that. I put in RH 9 install CD 1, ran autorun, and installed the kde software development package. This supplies the kde headers needed and the qt headers in qt-devel. I found I also had to install the libart-lgpl-devel rpm from a terminal. It's on the second RH install cd. Config worked after that. Make takes a while and gives lots of warnings; but it works.

The kde version gui runs slow on my 400 and 500 mhz computers, since I can't use the Nvidia graphics drivers without crashes, so I tried ./configure --with-gtk next. I had to install the gnome software development package for that. I installed the gnome software development package and glut-devel; but the gtk version still will not compile. If I do ./configure, I get the kde version. I can get the glut version with ./configure --without-kde --without-gtk. The command ./configure --without-kde sets up for the gtk version, but fails during make. - JD

Other Cool Applications

Predict-2.2.2 - This program lets you predict the exact position of orbiting satellites. It is text-based, but comes with some gui apps (that need a bit of work) in the source tree. I managed to get one going that plots the earth on my x root window and updates every several seconds.