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/
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.
The latest version of Celestia is 1.4.1; but it is not available as a RH rpm as of 12/13/08 that I know of. So, you have to compile it from the source code. The kde and glut, but not the gtk versions worked for me. The official tarball may be missing some kde related files, so get the complete tarball here: http://celestia.teyssier.org/
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
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. see: http://puffin.tamucc.edu/~mwilliamson/iss-view/ for an example of what it can do. (yes, the orbits and the clouds are current) To have good results, you'll need your clock synced with NIST time (ntpd can do this for you) and you will need current orbital elements. Just search the web for keplerian elements.