[PLUG] program you should know about: celestia - wander the galaxy, in opengl

[Darxus@chaosreigns.com]

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ 
(or "apt-get install celestia" under Debian)

I originally found out about this when talking to the author of xplanet
about the one mode in it which uses opengl (-animate).  He told me
"I'm in the middle of a complete rewrite and I'm going to drop the
animation entirely.  Celestia is a much better OpenGL planet viewer...."
(xplanet is like xearth - draws the earth, shaded appropriately, with
lat/long markers.. except this one uses a satellite photograph texturemap).

Celestia is really cool.  You can fly around the universe as it looks now,
or any other time you'd like to set.  The orbits are accurate.  All of the
planets are texturemapped with the best info the author could get.
Irregularly shaped moons of Jupiter are properly irregularly shaped.
Movement speed is exponential, so you can reasonably fly around a planet,
or to another star.

The part that blew my mind the most was the background.  You know how
a bunch of programs have stars as backgrounds ?  They all just draw
random dots.  Except celestia - every single freaking dot is a *real*
star, named, in the right place, and you can click on it and go there.

You can see other galaxies as a kind of 3d texture, with no actual star
data.  When viewing our own galaxy, it's rendered with a similar 3d
texture.  

Oh, and you can also turn on constellations - so it'll draw the lines
between all the stars in the constellations.  Which looks pretty funky when
viewed from a far away star.  

If someone had asked me if this kind of data with this kind of range of
scale could be rendered with any kind of decent frame rate on my computer,
I probably would have laughed at them.  I expect it to work well on most
computers with a 3D accelerator card (I have a voodoo 3).

This thing.. increases appreciation of how ridiculously big the galaxy is.

-- 
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands,
hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
 - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
http://www.ChaosReigns.com
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