I've got the bigearth, moon and mars textures (.dds files).
Now i've got a question.
When I go to one of these objects for the first time after starting celestia, the camera runs towards it, it gets bigger and bigger ... and then, there is a break. object disappears, reappears and thats it.
This only happens once (flying to object somewhen later from anywhere and after viewing the universe a bit works fine, without break)
So this fact makes me believe:
Celestia seems to not preload textures for some kind of mipmapping.
As this saves memory, it's overall good, but: what about loading textures when an object is selected (during user is on the journey to it) ?
(maybe i'm wrong - i've never viewed celestia code and it's just about my hardware)