Wow. I haven't been this excited about astronomy since I was in 5th grade and made a (not to scale, obviously) model of the solar system using styrofoam balls, coat hangers, and a light bulb. The 21st century may not have flying cars yet, but this is definitely what they promised computers would do some day. My heartfelt thanks to Chris and all you other folks who work on Celestia.
Now a question:
Has anyone else written any cool scripts for Celestia like the demo? Looking at the code for the demo, it doesn't look too hard, and I'm sure I'll make a couple myself once I get more familiar with the program, but it would be neat to see a few more guided tours of the highlights of Celestia's corner of the Milky Way.
Can you manipulate time from a script? It would be cool to have one that started in Earth orbit, zoomed out perpendicular to the ecliptic, showing the orbital lines, sped time back (or forward) to an alignment of planets, sped again to an eclipse and then zoomed in to see it from various vantage points. Or one that followed the flight path of one of the Voyagers in compressed time, slowing down to watch the planets. Or duplicate orbit of one of the Apollo missions (can you make the spacecraft models move out of their orbits and follow them chase-cam style?)