Firstly, there should be in Navigation menu several new camera views. Ones which I think are important are Zenith, Horizon, Nadir and Opposite. Zenith would center camera to zenith, Horizon to horizon (at current longitude), Nadir to nadir (point opposite to zenith), and Opposite would center camera to opposite of current position. Some uses of these options could be: one puts himself around Sun, set camera to zenith, orbit Sun until he finds some interesting constellation, then set to opposite to see which stars are behind Sun; then he could go to one of them and see how Sun looks like projected on that constelation; setting camera to nadir would turn it exactly towards the object it rotates around; etc.
Then, there should be way to enter camera coordinates (and zoom) as there is for observer coordinates. It should be possible to enter celestial longitude and latitude of point to which camera points, maybe even relative to zenith. Zoom could be entered in degrees, in magnification, in size of field of vision at some distance, and there should also be some presets, at least naked eye and then some known telescopes (Palomar, Keck, Hubble...). If this is implemented, camera coordinates should be displayed above maginification in the bottom right corner. BTW, why not having field of vision larger then 120 degrees?
And while talking of entering coordinates, it should also be possible to enter TIME
) I want to see certain solar eclipses and it is hard to do that with current way of setting time.
About time: I feel the need for going back and forth in time with one keypress. For example, one day back/forth. I don't have idea on how to implement this.
It would be nice to have possibility of choosing preseted observer points. They could be stored in another .ssc file. For Earth, these could be major cities, and for other bodies, spacecraft landing sites and prominent geographical features. Poles could be included by default, and also point closest to planet for tidaly locked sattelites. These points could be acessed by entering their names in Go to/Select Object windows, right clicking on a body, or via planet browser, or one could just click on one of these points and go there... there should also be an option for making their names visible. It is true that one can save his location, but that simply is not it
Right click on some object brings possibility to view it's info on the net. It is nice, but it should be possible to see some built-in info, for data the program knows. Magnitude, for example, is easy for Celestia to calculate, and virtually impossible to calculate manually by looking in stellar data on the web.
Date should be localised. At least, month names should be displayed instead of numbers so that people from various locales would know which is which.
Coordinate lines are nice, but it would be even nicer if they would have appropriate numbers (these should be possible to turn off). More lines could be added (horizon, ecliptic, celestial equator, galactic equator) and then some points (celestial poles, galactic poles, zenith/nadir).
This one is important: I can't figure out how camera works and what are differences between it's modes. This could be made very simple if there would be not one, but two selections: one for observer and one for camera. Combining different camera and observer modes could make all modes of today in easier to understand way. But this requires some bigger chnges in the program. At very least, camera modes should be explained in documentation in some detail
Oh, and, by the way, ChangeLog on the site is of v1.2.0
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Finnaly, I have a question. I can't see night lights on Earth. I don't think it's a memory problem as I can't even if I hide Earth's texture. What could be wrong?
Which reminds me: Brown dwarfs should have night lights! It should be the same texture as normal one, but a bit dimmed. Maybe there are some other objects which should have them too, I'm not sure but maybe Io
