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A comment on The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years. Parent comment

Re:The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years by kangnkodos on Thursday February 20, 2020 @05:17PM (#22379174)
About 15 years ago, I used the open source program, Celestia. You could move around the solar system and beyond in 3D. It was cool at the time, but I haven't looked at it in a long time.

It also allowed add-on data to be imported. Hobbyists would create accurate 3D models of weird shaped asteroids using the latest data from NASA, and you could download the data, and view it using the main Celestia program.

Maybe someone has posted updated data in Celestia format somewhere?

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Re:The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years by karatestomp on Thursday February 20, 2020 @06:48PM (#22379706)
You can script it in Lua. I once used that to make a presentation in it for my wife to use in class. Showed the Solar system from above, then visited Sol and each planet in turn, doing a split-screen with Earth and zooming whichever pane had the smaller body to compare sizes, that sort of thing. It was like having a scriptable Magic Schoolbus. Pretty cool.
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Re:The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years by tyfon on Thursday February 20, 2020 @05:25PM (#22379218)
That sounds really awesome and it seems the project is still alive [1]. I'm going to play with this after work tomorrow!

[1] https://celestia.space/

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Re:The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years by brylie on Friday February 21, 2020 @04:11AM (#22381880)
I'd like to explore Celestia with my son but can't find an installer for Ubuntu 19.10. Anyone know of a Flatpak or Snap installer for Celestia?
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