Celestia Forums

I have a 9 years old son which is passionate of astronomy. I?€™m struggling to find some astronomy software for his passion but with very little success. Until now I have found Iris astronomy software which is pretty interesting, and I need similar software but more specific to his age.
Thank you in advance for your help.

Celestia helps a lot in showing young people the structure of the solar system, the motions of the planets and such. I hope Celestia proves helpful to you and your child

sandra wrote:I have a 9 years old son which is passionate of astronomy. I?€™m struggling to find some astronomy software for his passion but with very little success. Until now I have found Iris astronomy software which is pretty interesting, and I need similar software but more specific to his age.
Thank you in advance for your help.

Well my son was hooked on Celestia from 9-10 years old. Also Stellarium which is great on a laptop so you can take it outside at night. I've worked through Frank's "Educational addons" for celestia with both children even though designed for high school. With me there to interpret, they were entranced and I have used them in school visits with much younger groups.

My biggest beef is that Celestia can be quite hard to drive and took a fair bit of use for my son to be familiar with the controls. Its very easy to get "lost" if say trying to find a vantage point to look at why we get phases on the moon. Accelerate too fast and you are lost in space very quickly.

Sandra,

I have to admit I would never even have considered introducing a 9 year old to Iris. It's more of a package to be used by someone who's very familiar with astrophotography and telescope control. And the translation from French into English could be improved, I think.

In addition to Frank's educational resources at
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catal ... tional.php
there are some introductory Web pages which use Celestia to explore the Solar System. They're on a NASA site at http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/planets/
They work with Celestia v1.4.1 but not with v1.5.0.
Unfortunately, since that particular department seems to have lost its funding, it's unlikely those pages will be updated.