I am pleased to announce a new Educational Activity. Activity 8 is a continuation of Activity 7, and takes you on a detailed tour of many of the planetary spacecraft that have explored our Solar System outside of the Earth/moon system. The history of each spacecraft is detailed in the written Activity, along with cel:url visits to the spacecraft at the best times to see something interesting.
The Activity visits such craft as Mariner, Magellan, Venera, Viking, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Spirit and Opportunity, Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini and Huygens, Ulysses, Near and the recently launched Deep Impact, among others.
For your enjoyment, the Spacecraft of Celestia Part 2 then branches off into deep space to visit some of the amazing fictional spacecraft of Hollywood. Along the way, you'll see and visit the USS Enterprise, USS Voyager, Deep Space 9, a Klingon Bird of Prey and a bevy of Borg Cubes from the Star Trek universe. Or drop by the StarWars solar system to see such ships as the massive Death Star, the Imperial Star Destroyer, a squadron of Tie fighters, the Millenium Falcon and Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter. From the movie 2001, a Space Odyssey, you can try to dock with a huge rotating space station or visit the Discovery, abandoned in Jupiter space near the mysterious Monolith in orbit around Jupiter. Finally, we intercept Babylon 5 on its journey through the MIlky Way.
In many ways, this is my best work. and is available at both my website (http://www.fsgregs.org/celestia), and the Motherlode (http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/educational.html). Although all spacecraft add-ons are included, Activity 8 requires that you also download the General Add-ons download file from the Educational websites and load it as well. It contains some high-res textures of Earth and Mars, among others. It also contains a star data file that is required by Activity 8.
The Activity will not run on Celestia 1.4.0 because it requires the use of an older star file that 1.4.0 no longer recognizes. I am hoping a new star file will become available soon. In the meantime, if you wish to run it on 1.4.0, you need to edit the celestia.cfg file that comes with the add-on, and change the line that says
[ StarDatabase "data/bigstars.dat" ]
to
[ StarDatabase "data/stars.dat" ]
The Activity is written in MS Word, and comes complete with a detailed student worksheet which can be printed and completed for a grade. It takes about 2 - 3 hours to complete the journey, while reading the educational text.
Hope you all enjoy it. Feel free to e-mail me with comments.
