Public Exposure -- How much has Celestia received?

[Size_Mick]

I have to start this post off by first telling you how *I* found out about Celestia.

I am a computer tech by trade and was working in a retail store back in 1997, a small but highly profitable locally owned store (thanks to the energy posessed by my amazing boss, the owner -- the guy practically lived at work). We were among the first stores in town to have orders placed for gaming rigs, and of course 3D was a brand new thing on the consumer market. After a few duds, along came this great card called the Diamond Monster 3D, built on the 3dfx Voodoo chipset. This certainly is the most popular card ever made using that chipset. I got my hands on one of the first :)

After installing a few of these into systems, and testing them for functionality, I began to notice that, hey, these graphics just blew away anything I'd seen from any other video card! So of course I immediately spent half a week's pay on one.

Being the intrepid 3D card owning person that I was, I immediately went to work looking for patches to games, screensavers, whatever I could find. Eventually, a great little website called 3dfxmania sprang up. It carried daily postings of links to all the latest and greatest software for Voodoo owners. One day they linked this really cool program called Ssystem, a Solar system simulator. It was wicked cool! But of course it did have some problems, and back then all we had to run it on was Win95 (I didn't know much about non-MS OSes back then). So, it was impressive to watch but little bugs crept in after you got into it deep.

Well, development sort of ceased on that particular program for a long time, apparently at least. What I didn't know was that it wound up being this larger project called Open Universe. But I would discover this about 2 years ago, when I had a sudden desire to find anything else I could that was related to Ssystem, in case I missed some cool add-on or bug patch or something. OpenUniverse apparently had ground to a halt when I finally found it, but it had links pointing to -- TADA! Celestia :)

Well, this long story has a point: Nowhere had I heard about Celestia on the internet, even though I'm a *highly* frequent user, until I deliberately went looking for this type of program. This makes me feel like maybe Celestia needs some public exposure to increase its popularity, and hopefully generate more volunteers or contributors.

To this end, I wanted to brainstorm some ideas to you folks and see what you think. To wit:

1. Get a Celebrity to mention/plug Celestia. I live not too far from that Star Hustler guy, I bet I could drive over to his office and give him a sales pitch on the idea of mentioning Celestia on his show or something. Maybe TechTV or some similar show would be another idea. It wouldn't be hard to email them and suggest it at least.

2. If anyone has the available bandwidth to do so, have a Celestia banner link thingy that people can point to as their signature URL in other forums (I am a member of like 9 or 10 other forums besides this one, so assuming there are other people who spend as much time on the internet as I do, it would definitely help spread the message).

3. Burn Celestia installation CDs and send them to colleges and universities around the free world, asking for donations, volunteers, web space, whatever. Remember to send them to the astronomy departments as well as the computer science departments :) I figure several of us as a group should be able to accomplish this without much out-of-pocket expense on any one individual's behalf.

Well, those are a few ideas. Hopefully someone else can come up with others. Celestia is just an incredible program and it is easy enough for even people like me to use with only a passing familiarity with astronomy. I would really love to see it flourish and get the recognition it deserves as being perhaps the most powerful tool available to the public to understand astronomy in general and our solar system in particular, next to a telescope :)

P.S. Would it be possible to build a box that could hook up to a PC and allow Celestia to control a telescope? It'd be cool if it were possible to program Celestia to have a special mode for doing that. (Obviously you'd have to make the camera fixed to a specified point on the Earth that the user must input, perhaps in coordinate fashion, to match his location, and other boring technical details like that.)

[t00fri]

...

To this end, I wanted to brainstorm some ideas to you folks and see what you think. To wit:

1. Get a Celebrity to mention/plug Celestia. I live not too far from that Star Hustler guy, I bet I could drive over to his office and give him a sales pitch on the idea of mentioning Celestia on his show or something. Maybe TechTV or some similar show would be another idea. It wouldn't be hard to email them and suggest it at least.

2. If anyone has the available bandwidth to do so, have a Celestia banner link thingy that people can point to as their signature URL in other forums (I am a member of like 9 or 10 other forums besides this one, so assuming there are other people who spend as much time on the internet as I do, it would definitely help spread the message).

3. Burn Celestia installation CDs and send them to colleges and universities around the free world, asking for donations, volunteers, web space, whatever. Remember to send them to the astronomy departments as well as the computer science departments I figure several of us as a group should be able to accomplish this without much out-of-pocket expense on any one individual's behalf.

Well, those are a few ideas. Hopefully someone else can come up with others. Celestia is just an incredible program and it is easy enough for even people like me to use with only a passing familiarity with astronomy. I would really love to see it flourish and get the recognition it deserves as being perhaps the most powerful tool available to the public to understand astronomy in general and our solar system in particular, next to a telescope

P.S. Would it be possible to build a box that could hook up to a PC and allow Celestia to control a telescope? It'd be cool if it were possible to program Celestia to have a special mode for doing that. (Obviously you'd have to make the camera fixed to a specified point on the Earth that the user must input, perhaps in coordinate fashion, to match his location, and other boring technical details like that.)

Why not sending SPAM mail to

10 000 000 000 addresses advertizing

C.e.l.e.s.t.i.a instead of
V.i.a.g.r.a?


Bye Fridger

[Christophe]

P.S. Would it be possible to build a box that could hook up to a PC and allow Celestia to control a telescope? It'd be cool if it were possible to program Celestia to have a special mode for doing that. (Obviously you'd have to make the camera fixed to a specified point on the Earth that the user must input, perhaps in coordinate fashion, to match his location, and other boring technical details like that.)

Celestia is not really meant to be an ephemeris software, so controling a telescope would be better done using the likes of XEphem or KStars. But it's certainly possible to make Celestia do it, using the INDI protocol developped by Elwood C. Downey it could even be relatively easy, and we could 'leverage' code from KStars. Testing would be a problem though, but if anyone is willing to buy me a motorized telescope... ;-)

[selden]

Celestia was featured on TechTV about six months ago (June through August).

http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/freefile/story/0,24330,3358867,00.html

The load on http://www.shatters.net was, ummm, rather high for several weeks.

I'm not sure why you would want to restrict it to what you're calling the "free world" (or even what you mean by that term these days). There are people in the FSU and in China already using it, for example.

[Darkmiss]

That Kstars looks like a nice program

But i take it you have to put it together yourself
as i couldn't make head nor tails of the downloaded zip file.

I nothing of compiling or whatever it takes to make these files runnable.

is there anywhere to download it all put together

[Mikeydude750]

It was also on TechTV way back in December 2001, when I found out about it.

[Christophe]

That Kstars looks like a nice program

But i take it you have to put it together yourself :?:
as i couldn't make head nor tails of the downloaded zip file.

I nothing of compiling or whatever it takes to make these files runnable.

is there anywhere to download it all put together :?:

KStars is part of KDE (the K Desktop Environment) for Unix, it is not available for Windows, but it is included in all Linux distributions.

There is a port of KDE to Windows (using Cygwin) but it's probably very user un-friendly to set up.

[longbeer]

I found Celestia through a reference in a description for an Orbiter add-on on avsim.com! A Google search later and I've found the coolest thing thing I've seen in a very long time. I burnt a stack of CDs for Christmas presents (a huge thanks to whoever designed the CD covers, by the way) just in time for the new version

While I agree making more people aware of it's existance would be a good thing, I'm concerned that the existing web infrastucture won't cope. Perhaps an approach to the owners of the above mentioned Avsim.com - who already host files for Orbiter, MS Trainsim and Nascar as well as various flight simulators - would kill two birds with one stone.

Laurie

[maxim]

I don't think that there are very much more people outside that could be attracted by celestia for long with it's current user interface (specially for Addon integration). Don't misunderstand me, I think it's ok - you can work with it - but it causes efforts that a lot of people are not willing to invest from the beginning.

I've spread it to eight of my friends (that where interested) now. Six of them said they couldn't get it to work properly (with addons). I gave the documentations to them, I told them I would come over an help them. I said, well just call me for making a date for it. Every time I meet them now I'm asking "Ok, what about celestia?" - "Oh yes, I didn't call you because I hadn't time for it yet" - "Well, it doesn't take much time. Fifteen minutes to half an hour maximum" - "Yes, let's make a date soon... ehmmm... perhaps it's not such a good program by causing so much effort" - "It IS a very good program, and it doesn't cause more effort that any other program" - "Yes, ehmmm..."
...they still aren't working with it.

You see what I mean?

maxim

[selden]

Different people have different interests. Some people are fascinated by computers and astronomy. Others would far rather carouse with their friends at the local pub. Or rebuild their car.

*shrug*

[Harry]

I don't think that there are very much more people outside that could be attracted by celestia for long with it's current user interface (specially for Addon integration).

I disagree. There are a lot of people who never heard of it, and some percentage of them would love it If they only knew...

I've spread it to eight of my friends (that where interested) now. Six of them said they couldn't get it to work properly (with addons).

In my experience it works fine:
A) (optional, for registry entries) Install celestia normally
B) Copy over a copy of "your" celestia installation, notably the extras-directory.
This of course requires a way to pass on a CD-R (or a lot of webspace).

Harald

[JackHiggins]

selden

You're absolutely right- BUT- how will people know if they have an interest in astronomy/space/celestia, if they've never really looked at it very seriously? If Celestia is their first introduction of any kind to this area, they could find it kinda hard to get into, give up, and forget about it.

Or, as maxim said, they might have an interest in the general area but not use celestia because it IS difficult to get addons working, if you've never had any prior experience, or if you're a novice computer user.

...

On the idea that celestia needs more public exposure- I'd agree, and size_mick's suggestions seem to be reasonable ones!
1. Something i'd love to see- especially if it was a "mainstream" celebrity... Britney Spears promotes semiconductor physics*, so I can't see how we can't do something similar here...
2. I'll make one! I'm a member of several other forums too, and have my sig pointing to my Addons site, and the celestia homepage.
3. There was a guy from OpenCD (?) on the forum a while back, he wanted to have celestia on it- but there were some- er.. questions about licenses- not sure what happened there...

*

I've told many people about celestia- they also thought it was very good, but required a lot of effort (for them anyway) to get addons to work properly.

One thing I noticed in the last few days... Since the landing of Spirit, daily hits on my website have increased by- wait for it.. Almost 60%!!* More general public interest in space exploration is probably the single best way to increase use of Celestia also. The Mars rovers site has apparently recieved over 1 billion total hits!

* Actually a 58% increase- thats an average of the week before compared to an average of the week after the spirit landing. Still pretty damn good!

[maxim]

Different people have different interests.

Well, they were interested, so I gave Celestia to them.

In my experience it works fine...

I also thought so... but it isn't as simple obviously.

At first, at present it actually reqires some effort making the better things available. Even if you just want to change clouds you have to edit solarsys.ssc - and using Franks 'Life and Death of Stars' even requires some more editing of the solarsys-file. And usually you have to assemble hires VTs with appropriate specular maps and normal maps by yourself.

But I think there are more general psychologic reasons. Most people who are not working on computers daily, have some kind of mental block for it, and feel uncomfortable in doing things they are uncertain of.

For us who have the experience in those things, it's often not imaginable of how few other people know, or of how uncertain they feel. It's no problem for us to read a definition for something on the fly and then get things to work in a minute. Not for them. I am regularily surprised when talking to my customers, or the teenagers I'm teaching sometimes, of how much of a tech vocabulary I'm using without recognizing it, even when I try to speak in what I think are clear an simple words - and nobody understands what I'm talking about.

This uncertainty is of course not a special thing of computer science. Let me give an example: There are obvious more people who feel themselves able to change a car wheel, than an air filter or a defective ignition cable. In most cars it's a thing of a minute to change air filter or ingition cable, and there's nothing about it. Changing a wheel is much more work. But they change the wheel, and drive their car to a service station for letting change the air filter.

What I want to say is that a lot of people would use programs that install themselves with all components, but leave hands off if there's something to do 'by hand', even if it's just changing one line of text within an editor.

And they don't call and ask for help because that would make their uncertainty more obvious than they like - and it would result in changing something on a runnings system by some 'stranger' - people tend to rely more on automatic procedures than on other people.

I think there is a point of breakthrought. Were celestia changes from an insider program to a well known and common used application. And it has to do with the ease of accessing it's possibilities.

My conclusion is, that there is still some more work to be done on addon integration issues for celestia. And it wouldn't be bad if there would exist one or two extention packages that REALLY could be plugged in by a simple click. To ensure perfect integration into the actual celestia distribution, it would be Chris or someone of the main programmers who'd have to provide them.

Well, thank you all for listening. You've been a kind audience.

And sorry for the misspellings,

maxim

[Size_Mick]

I would like to re-address one of my ideas though:

Sending out CDs to colleges and universities in the "Free World" (not North Korea or Iran or some of those African countries, I guess): This would be sort of a carrot on a stick to get help from them, for hosting/volunteers, whatever. Especially the hosting part :) We need a central repository for all the cool gargantuan textures you people keep coming up with!

In a second thought on this, would it be hard to just throw together a links page for everyone to submit links to, and would it be hard to keep it updated or could the process be automated?

I mean, it's cool that a lot of you guys have your own Celestia pages and all, but it'd be cooler if I could find links to everyone's downloads on one convenient page.

Perhaps an auto-submit form thing could be worked out, then an auto-checker thing to make sure links aren't dead, then an auto-vote thing for people to vote on whether a submitted link actually has anything to do with celestia or not (so removal of spam links is somewhat "automated")?

[t00fri]

selden

You're absolutely right- BUT- how will people know if they have an interest in astronomy/space/celestia, if they've never really looked at it very seriously? If Celestia is their first introduction of any kind to this area, they could find it kinda hard to get into, give up, and forget about it.

Jack,

this sort of argument I really have problems following.

There are inspiring TV broadcasts, there are most of all

BOOKS

Are you telling me that people cannot read anymore?
The standard excuse is that people "have no time"...hmmm

When I was 12 years old and my father had explained some basics about the stars to me during 'family walks' in the dark, I bought a 5cm lens/1m focus with my little pocket money and built a very simple telescope with a cardboard tube. I still remember how exciting this was: the first time I saw jupiter's bands, the Galilean moons and the craters on the moon.


Why are such exciting, simple, cheap and most instructive approaches not even considered anymore???


Why does my first contact with the sky, space and all that have to involve a

--fairly hightech compi
--a fancy 3d graphics card

...and a package as complex as Celestia?

Why can people's interest in astronomy only be stimulated with computerized GOTO telescopes. It would be much more fun to learn about the sky in a book first and then people will be proud and develop a feeling of success if they found the Andromeda galaxy via star hopping rather than via GOTO (with a lot of accompanying noise from their motor gears;-)

I probably decided to become a physicist after all, precisely since my first contacts with nature and the universe were elementary, so direct and thus most challenging...

And those friends of Maxim also don't strike me as particularly easy to motivate...Probably they much prefer playing Quake3 or similar.

Bye Fridger

[Mikeydude750]

I've been interested in astronomy my whole life. When I first started reading, at the age of 4, I read books on the night sky. I actually gained a lot of my reading skills from reading books on astronomy before I even entered the first level of schooling.

That said, let's not discount the effect programs like Celestia can have on educating people on astronomy, especially since addons can be added to further teach people.

Like maxim said earlier about the addons, all that would be needed is if addon makers would be packaged into a single executable file (make executables for OS X, Windows, and Linux). Or, maybe Celestia can come with a program that will sort out your addons for you(just open a ZIP file in it, and it will automatically put things where they're needed).

Celestia really has the potential to become a great learning tool, as long as some issues with ease-of-use can be resolved. Sending out CDs with the program already configures with addons to educational institutions is a good idea as well...but the installation would be something to work on.

[David]

3. There was a guy from OpenCD (?) on the forum a while back, he wanted to have celestia on it- but there were some- er.. questions about licenses- not sure what happened there...

Celestia 1.3.0 is included in the current version of TheOpenCD, so whatever the issue was it must have been sorted out.

http://www.theopencd.org

David

[selden]

The license issues had to do with Addons.

The OpenCD authors wanted to interpret Celestia's GPL as including Addons. Addon authors objected. Chris settled it by saying that Celestia's GPL does not extend to Addons. Hopefully this information will be added to the SourceForge site soon.

See http://63.224.48.65/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3945

Chris' response is at the end: http://63.224.48.65/forum/viewtopic.php?p=27794&highlight=#27794

[JackHiggins]

Fridger

Ok DUH that was an obvious one that should have been mentioned before...

Why does my first contact with the sky, space and all that have to involve a

--fairly hightech compi
--a fancy 3d graphics card

...and a package as complex as Celestia?

I agree it's certainly not the best way to get introduced to the area, and in any case they will see more about space elsewhere on the internet before they discover celestia. Then again.. These things just werent around 15-20 years ago!

Why can people's interest in astronomy only be stimulated with computerized GOTO telescopes. It would be much more fun to learn about the sky in a book first and then people will be proud and develop a feeling of success if they found the Andromeda galaxy via star hopping rather than via GOTO (with a lot of accompanying noise from their motor gears;-)

Because people nowadays want to see nice pictures NOW! They don't want to have to go through all the "boring" technical details (which are really necessary for proper use). They want all the work done for them... Then if something doesnt workm the way its supposed to, they complain or give up.

It's been discussed before many times but this is the same type of mindset which is causing intrest in science & technology to drop, even though there is more & more of it around us. People want things to work, they don't care WHY it works the way it does.

But thats really going off on a serious tangent since this thread is about how to increase awareness of celestia...

[t00fri]

...
It's been discussed before many times but this is the same type of mindset which is causing intrest in science & technology to drop, even though there is more & more of it around us. People want things to work, they don't care WHY it works the way it does.

But thats really going off on a serious tangent since this thread is about how to increase awareness of celestia...

Hey jack,

I can't help telling you that I always enjoy your clear mind and insights. Perhaps you don't want to hear such compliments. Sorry....

But I think you really just hit the point (as usual).

In principle, there is nothing bad about the fact that things change with time. It's only natural.

But there is a trend developing worldwide that has a very negative impact on the basics related to science or better the interest of people in science!

For example, the US have just issued their hierarchy listing of "big science" projects to be supported by the DOE (US Department Of Energy). Apparently, the highest priorities are attached to activities that are related to energy resources and computing ('fusion' and high-tech networking). Things not unrelated to 'money making'. Basic science has been moved quite a bit into the 'background'. Astrophysics projects are ranging highest among basic science (Dark energy, Dark matter searches....)

And on a small scale this all boils down to people being not interested anymore in the big WHY questions of basic science. Gadgets related to science are becoming much more attractive, instead of the original underlying questions. Cf. my GOTO telescope example.


Bye Fridger