[X] My Assistant

[claurel]

I know that unmannedspaceflight.com has a few Celestia users... For those who aren't familiar with Celestia, it's a free interactive 3D model of the universe that simulates the motions and appearance of stars, planets, moons, spacecraft, and other bodies. There are a few new capabilities that will be of particular interest to readers of this forum:

- Simulation of the effects of planetshine
- Overlays of longitude/latitude grids and the terminator on planets and moons
- Updated Cassini mission (now covers launch through the end of the extended mission, though you'll want Jason Perry's add-on for the most accurate Cassini simulation)
- Improved rendering of eclipses (especially nice for mutual events of the Saturnian satellites)
- Adaptive resolution grids for different celestial coordinate systems: equatorial, ecliptic, horizontal, and galactic
- More accurate models of the rotation states of solar system bodies
- Ability to use orientation information from SPICE kernels
- Triaxial shapes for Mimas, Haumea, and other noticeably non-spheroidal bodies
- New maps for the Saturnian satellites and Mercury



Some more details are here: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/features/160-features.html

Celestia can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/files/

I hope that unmannedspaceflight readers find the new version fun and useful. Enjoy!

--Chris