Celestia Forums

This will seem a waste of a superb program, but can anyone tell me how to land on Earth at a given lat-lon and then remain there, looking at the night sky while I change the date and the speed of time?

Sailmariner wrote:This will seem a waste of a superb program, but can anyone tell me how to land on Earth at a given lat-lon and then remain there, looking at the night sky while I change the date and the speed of time?

Incredible, this sounds like a real advert for the Lua Edu Tools !
I wouldn't have done it better.

Seriously, you can do it with the Ctrl+G keys.
If you'd like to use a nice interface for that, with some specific tools, you can have a look here :
> http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10352

That's called "planetarium mode". It's described in the "Preliminary User's FAQ" which is a sticky near the top of the Users Forum. See Q/A # 19.

Thanks for the attempts, but neither one seems to work.

1. I believe that the instructions for Planetarium Mode leave a Mac user out in the cold.

2. I attempted to follow the instructions for installing LUA very carefully, but it aborts at start-up.

3. I of course tried to go to the surface of the Earth in ordinary usage of Celestia, but a number of odd results occur. At altitude zero, you don't see anything. At a slightly higher altitude (e.g., 0.1 km or even 100 km) you see the stars but not the Earth horizon.

BTW, I am a pilot and I would not have made the left-right arrow keys as roll controls, but rather, yaw controls. I would have been happy with Shift-L or -R for roll. The up-down arrows are backwards if you are flying (e.g., up arrow should bring your nose up, not down). I don't know if this is only on Macs, but it is highly counter-intuitive. I feel my spacecraft was built by the lowest bidder.