Celestia Forums

Respected Members and Admin Sir,
I’m a High school teacher using celestial since five years, now i purchased IPAD PRO. I want to run celestia and its Educational version on it ? My Questions are
1. Is Celestia available for IPAD PRO ver ios 12 ?
2. How to run educational activity on ipad pro ?
3. From which link i’m able to download it ? Plz share

Thankss in advance....

Unfortunately, Celestia is not available for iOS (iPhone or iPad) or Android, only for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Porting Celestia to either iOS or Android would require substantial effort.

For what it's worth, there are iOS and Android apps which make it possible to use a tablet (or phone) to display the screen of a desktop or laptop computer which is running Celestia.

Also, there are several 3D astronomical visualization and educational apps available for either iOS or Android, although I have no experience with any of them.

It is theoretically possible to compile for android, and I believe ios as well, via the QTcreator if you have the ADK or equivalent for ios installed on your system and can get the configurations correct.

I poked at QT version for android before deciding that having celestia for android wasn't worth having to use QT.


Janus.

Edit: Fix speling.

To be fair, I think we really need an iOS or Android version for Celestia. Celestia is a very good software that I would recommend, so it would be great if effort was put into making an iOS/Android version for it. My phone is an Apple iPod and I think Celestia would be perfect for it (though I have Solar Walk in it as well).

Thanks to All Sir,
I’m very thankful to you all for answer and guidance...
As most people tends to mobiles ipads and other small devices... it is necessary ios and android version will be there..
Hope admins and other developers think on this point sincerly...
Thankss again

He does have a point; more people use portable devices over personal, "fixed" computers.
Creating a mobile version for Celestia, along with how to download addons for a mobile version, should be a priority if we want to extend its accessibility.

I have always thought Celestia could use an IOS version since other planetarium software, like Stellarium, have IOS apps. Especially since Stellarium has two IOS apps.

Anthony_B_Russo10 wrote:I have always thought Celestia could use an IOS version since other planetarium software, like Stellarium, have IOS apps. Especially since Stellarium has two IOS apps.

Not just Stellarium. SkySafari by Simulation Curriculum is also very good. I have the lite version, so obviously I have none of the much better features that are available on the paid versions. But from what I know, the lite version's very interactable, has a mini-wiki of information on the stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, constellations, deep-sky objects and artificial satellites. They also have a list of ambient sounds that you can choose, which are meant to mimic the sounds of common locations for stargazing, which is really calm to the ear. And all in all, SkySafari's an enjoyable Space App to use.

We should first develop and refine Celestia 1.7.0, along with the Astro DB build, since both could make great strides in the features of Celestia, then we can port Celestia for both iOS and Android. That way, Celestia can become a rival to both Stellarium and SkySafari, plus most of the items that would be only available on the purchasable versions of Stellarium and SkySafari would be available for free in Celestia.

When think of it Celestia for mobile devices would be extremely useful in the education market when it considered how out dated some information on the space in general is especially the Solar System along with very outdated imagery... (of Pluto mainly.)

Anthony_B_Russo10 wrote:When think of it Celestia for mobile devices would be extremely useful in the education market when it considered how out dated some information on the space in general is especially the Solar System along with very outdated imagery...

That I agree. Not to mention Celestia would also be very accurate with information going as far out as the Observable Universe itself, and would also be the only free space simulation software that allows free roaming and travel through space to any other objects as far as the Observable Universe itself. SkySafari has that feature but I have to buy it before I can roam around the universe

That way, it would really be a great rival in the space app market, and to think we're doing that for free.

Well, the main issue stopping this from happening has to do with the render engine, currently Celestia only runs on OpenGL, whilst iOS/Android supports only OpenGLES, Metal, Vulkan etc.

Markerz wrote:Well, the main issue stopping this from happening has to do with the render engine, currently Celestia only runs on OpenGL, whilst iOS/Android supports only OpenGLES, Metal, Vulkan etc.

Perhaps the developers can find a way to make the data compatible with those render engines you mentioned. Besides, it's about time we have those improvements so that more data can be used in rendering Celestia than ever before.

After he stopped working on Celestia, the original author of Celestia (Chris Laurel) produced the iOS app "Cosmographia". It can be used to show objects orbiting within the Solar System, but does not support objects orbiting around other stars. It also uses a different orbit and object definition language, based on JSON.

See https://cosmoguide.org/

That's nice. But yeah, it should support exoplanets like Celestia, otherwise, it won't be authentic

Why don't we update Cosmographia to full-on Celestia for mobile, that can support addons?

Joey P. wrote:Why don't we update Cosmographia to full-on Celestia for mobile, that can support addons?

We gotta ask Chris first.

I think it's still easier to the revamp the render engine to support mobile platforms(OpenGL ES), which is ongoing in the Celestia git repo.

I have a personal project compiling the Celestia source files on the Mac and created shim with Objective-C which the Mac UI can just can call and display the simulated universe. Almost everything is portable to iOS. The dependencies(gettext, Lua, jpeg, libpng, spice, libfmt, ogg, theora) have its iOS counterparts, most of the shim can be used directly on iOS without modification except for the mouse/keyboard inputs which aren't available on iOS. The UI part must be redone but making a UI is trivial work compared to a revamp of render engine.

Well sadly I have little knowledge about graphics and rendering, but as soon as GLES support for Celestia is available, I will be able to work on the iOS port.