Celestia Forums

My father tried out Celestia at my recommendation, but immediately ran into the question "Now where do I go?" He didn't have much time to play around with it that day-- I gave him some suggestions.

But it got me wondering: What's your favorite sightseeing spot in the Celestia universe?

Mine would have to be any of the small inner moons of Jupiter (Metis, Adrastea, or Amalthea). Use one of the "animated" cloud texture add-ons, camp out on one of these moons, look toward the colossal disk of Jupiter, turn on eclipses, and crank up the time multiplier. This vantage point makes the two-level cloud animation particularly convincing because neither layer appears to be standing still.

I remember being amazed by a painting of the view from Amalthea in an old encyclopedia when I was a kid. I'd love to go there in real life, were the place not awash in deadly radiation.

I would say Titan with Saturn in the horizon...

Saturn and the Jovian moons are all great, but (until proper galaxy rendering comes along) my favourite view would have to be the Apollo 11 Command Module and LEM over a 4k texture of the Moon.

(Mad Boris)

My favorit sight: look the rising earth above the moon, as we can see on the celebr photo witch has taken by the crew of apollo 8 when they have just left the dark side of moon

I'll give you a couple:

Get close to any satellite orbiting around Saturn, hit Track ("t"), and click
on open space so "follow" goes off and only Track is on. Set time rate to
X100 to X10000 and you get this great scenario where the moon or
whatever moves away, goes behind the planet and comes back up close
to you - it's a wonderful "vista" - and there are infinite combinations.

I also like to simply move through the stars - just fast enough, and
click-drag the view to look sideways, up or whatever. For some reasons
I can do this for hours at a time - only made special because all the stars
are real. It's hard to explain. I guess you have to be there... go there.

BTW, the only problem is that this stops working sometimes - I haven't
tracked down why yet - at some point when you click-drag the direction
changes to new heading - so you just keep going forward. Maybe Chris
will give us a solid View control (while in motion) in a future version.

Vic

BTW, the only problem is that this stops working sometimes - I haven't
tracked down why yet - at some point when you click-drag the direction
changes to new heading - so you just keep going forward. Maybe Chris
will give us a solid View control (while in motion) in a future version.

This sounds like something I reported a short while ago. Chris confirmed that this was not so much a bug as a feature:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=374

As long as you stay away from the roll keys, it won't happen (but it does mean you have to roll the camera by making circular motions with the mouse).

Paul wrote:Chris confirmed that this was not so much a bug as a feature:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=374

As long as you stay away from the roll keys, it won't happen (but it does mean you have to roll the camera by making circular motions with the mouse).

Actually it's more than the roll keys. If you use some combination of
keystrokes (including Follow,Track,YSync), the ability to drag to a
different view without changing direction stops working 'till you restart
Celestia. I actually rarely use the roll keys.

One screenshot I took was the International Space Station, with the Milky Way in the background and Earth in the Horizon. It looked pretty nice.