Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless. The exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Next

3D Space Simulator

Celestia lets you explore our universe in three dimensions.

Celestia simulates many different types of celestial objects. From planets and moons to star clusters and galaxies, you can visit every object in the expandable database and view it from any point in space and time. The position and movement of solar system objects is calculated accurately in real time at any rate desired.

Next

Interactive Planetarium

Celestia serves as a planetarium – for an observer on any celestial object.

You can easily navigate to any world and land on its surface. When used as a planetarium, Celestia shows accurate positions of solar system objects in the sky. You can switch labels and other supporting features on and off with hotkeys, or zoom in and out on an object of interest, for example Jupiter’s system of moons.

Next

Expandable Content

Customize Celestia according to your needs.

Celestia’s catalogues can be easily expanded. There are many different add-ons available containing new objects like comets or stars, high-resolution textures of Earth and other well mapped solar system bodies, as well as 3D models for asteroids and spacecraft on precise trajectories. Even fictional objects from well-known sci-fi franchises can be found.

Next

Create your own worlds

Celestia allows you to add your own content.

If you don’t find a particular celestial object in the catalogues, you can simply create it yourself. Construct whole planetary systems, nebulae, galaxies or fictional objects. Celestia provides a unique opportunity to interactively demonstrate your creations.

Next

Other Celestia features

These are just some of the many features of Celestia

Virtual Textures

Virtual Textures can be used to display extremely high-resolution textures or close-up features on planetary surfaces. Celestia only loads the tiles it needs to display, increasing performance.

Audio playing

Play background music in CEL/CELX scripts in order to achieve greater effect. Available only for Celestia 1.7.0.

Trajectories

Celestia supports different types of trajectory data. Sampled Orbits for example can be used for spacecraft paths, or you can use NASA’s SPICE kernels for various solar system objects.