Celestia Forums

I've been using xplanet for quite some time now to generate my Linux (gnome) desktop background dynamically, with downloading live weather maps, and always looking at planet Earth from various interesting angles, updating the background every 15 minutes.

I wonder if something similar is possible to do with Celestia? Celestia seems to be a better maintained and more efficient package, overall.

Forgive me if this is a trivial issue, I looked at some Celestia related sites, and didn't find such a solution right away...

Nope, sorry.
Celestia is not designed to provide a dynamic desktop backdrop.

However, a (non-Celestia) 3D screensaver which shows scenes of the solar system is available at http://www.3dsolarsystem.com/
[edit]
Apparently, however, this particular program is not appropriate. See below. Other suggestions would be welcome.
[/edit]

selden wrote:However, a (non-Celestia) 3D screensaver which shows scenes of the solar system is available at http://www.3dsolarsystem.com/

Selden, just FYI here...
I would NOT recommend downloading the screen-saver you pointed to here. I installed the program and found that every time it runs, it opens an outward connection to the internet for something. Also, there is NO uninstaller available for the package, and it was a bear to get removed from my machine.

Again, just FYI.

Bob,

Thanks for the heads-up. I've added an appropriate comment to my original message.

One thing you can do is to take screen shots of your favorite Celestia Scenes (Using the F10 Key) and saving these in a screenshots folder. You can then go to Display Properties using the Control Panel and select Screensavers Tab then go to browse and select the screenshot folder holding your pictures. These will then be displayed as a screensaver

You can then go to Display Properties using the Control Panel and select Screensavers Tab then go to browse and select the screenshot folder holding your pictures. These will then be displayed as a screensaver

that works for a WINDOWS Operating System not linux !
a SS is not a bad idea you are running Gnome so "print Screen" button saves to ~/photos ,/home/(user name)/photos and change the background . also kde ( if you like it) has a setting to randomly change the background form a folder of photos

darkeye wrote:I've been using xplanet for quite some time now to generate my Linux (gnome) desktop background dynamically, with downloading live weather maps, and always looking at planet Earth from various interesting angles, updating the background every 15 minutes.

I wonder if something similar is possible to do with Celestia? Celestia seems to be a better maintained and more efficient package, overall.

Forgive me if this is a trivial issue, I looked at some Celestia related sites, and didn't find such a solution right away...

You can easily do something like a dynamic/animated desktop background, at least in Vista, with either DreamScene (Microsoft) or DreamScape (StarDock).
Randomly switching animated backgrounds to jump from one scripted movie capture to another should do the trick

Edit
Some more random ideas...
As far as a compositing desktop is available I believe a real-time Celestia background might not be that difficult to devise.
An elegant solution would be to run a Celestia instance rendering as a desktop background through a streaming local web server, kind of... platform independent.
I may dig into this as a personal challenge