Celestia Forums

If this already exists in Celestia, maybe someone can tell me how to do it.


I would like to be able to look outside my "spaceship" at other angles than that one where I am travelling. When I go forward, I can look at the direction I'm going and the rear view (where I'm coming from), but I can't look up, or down or through the windows at my left and at my right. It would be nice to look say to the right while still going forward.

If this can't be done, maybe someone should tell the people who are developing this program that it might be a good suggestion. Or, maybe i'm the only Celestia user in the world who thinks it's a good idea, in which case, just ignore my post.

I'd love to see something like this, actually. I want to do impressive flybys of planets while zooming past them, rather than watching them fill my view as I crash headlong into (and through) them

I think you can already do this, check the users guide found under documentation on the main page.

It seems the only thing one can currently do is look back using the * key (Shift+8). I think we're talking about things like looking sideways without changing the direction of travel. If you use the NumPad keys, they actually change your direction of motion, whereas if you use the arrow keys, they change the angle you're flying at. Neither of those changes your looking angle without changing the motion vector.

Don't have celestia installed on the work machine and no net on home one so couldn't check for you. I think you can use T to track a selected object while doing a flyby.

It is possible to lock your viewing direction to an object, I believe with ":". I forgot the details... It's nice for Voyager flyby's for example!

That's true, I'd forgotten about that... but what if you're just flying through space and want to see what's to your left or right? i.e. what if you don't have an object to lock on to or track?

you can see whatever direction you need while flying with F1..Fn buttons

pint wrote:you can see whatever direction you need while flying with F1..Fn buttons

No, you can't. The Fn buttons just allow you to travel at preset speeds.

To pint
Are you sure of this?

you can see whatever direction you need while flying with F1..Fn buttons

On my Celestia version (1.3.1 pre 5 under win XP) the F1-F7 keys sets the Observer speed.

I think that the capability of watching surrounding space around the observer form left, right, top, down independently by the lock and track is something that should be nice and actually is missing.

I'll add this item in my feature requests list in my website.

Bye - Paolo