I've just started working on a simple display of planets for Partiview,
another of the free 3D visualization programs.
(See http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/partiview/planets.html)
The Hayden Planetarium has released several deep-sky databases that
can be displayed using Partiview, including one of objects within the
Milky Way and one of extragalactic objects, as well as several
educational activities.
(See http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/hp/vo/du/index.html)
I thought it would be interesting to get the point of view of someone who hasn't posted here, so I asked Bob Lambert (McCarthy Observatory - IAU 932) what kinds of
features he thought could be improved in Celestia. Here's his response, quoted here with his permisson.
Bob wrote:There are many differences in the interface structure and the data content
at this point between Partiview and Celestia, and the interface structure
of Partiview is much better oriented to flying randomly through deep space.
All of the surveys and groups, the spheres (which I truly love for
teaching scale), the distance scales, the intensity and opacity control,
the error bars, and all of the control that Partiview imparts on the
operator to orbit, rotate, zoom, etc are wonderful. I have
dramatically more control at my immediate fingertips. and can instatnly
switch topics, jump to new places, reorient the screen, etc. The GUI
paradigm in Partiview, although challenging to learn, is superb when
mastered, and gives flexibility that is amazing. I love Celestia, but the
dynamic control and navigation it offers is dramatically different and not
nearly as well suited to true deep space navigation.
I would love to see some of the surveys in Celestia, however. I see the
two tools as strongly complimenting each other, and use them that way
constantly. If more of the surveys were in Celestia, they would be more
seamless. One could introduce deep sky with Celestia, then do deep dives,
so to speak, with Partiview for advanced topics.
We use Celestia/Partiview for K-12, public, and community adult ed. We
teach at the observatory we built, in classrooms, and a planetarium we
built (we funded, designed and built them both as volunteers - all of
us have private sector jobs - not professional educators). We are building
a comprehensive package of tools that we call "Astronomy to Go", that we
can take on a high-powered new laptop and with a new LCD projector we
bought, into any venue and teach solar, lunar, planetary, deep space,
latest NASA missions, etc - the toolset available for free or cheap
is astounding. Celestia and Partiview are the stars right now - I think
the new (soon, I hope) version of the TheSky will also be a key part.
There are a lot of tools in our laptop portable toolset, and growing
rapidly.
You can see a glimpse of our facility at
http://www.mccarthyobservatory.org/