Presenting Celestia at Conference - Ideas and Suggestions?

[Sam]

Hi all,
I am a graduate student presenting Celestia at an education conference as a tool to use in the classroom (mostly science, I suppose). I am running an Apple Powerbook 1.25 ghz, with 512mb of RAM (hopefully going to get more soon).

What I am looking for is a little help with textures and add-ons that won't bog down the computer during the presentation, but will look impressive. I am mostly interested in Earth and zooming in to specific points. The presentation is an hour long, so I am also interested in any tips or suggestions you (as more expert users than I) have on what areas to cover. Thank you very much for you help!

Sam Bjornestad

[alphap1us]

HI Sam,
Honestly, if you are focusing on the earth, Google Keyhole or Worldwind is going to be far more impressive than Celestia. The highest-def earth texture for Celestia is 43K, which is about 100m^2 I believe. The two programs I mentioned will let you zoom from seeing one entire side of the earth at one time to showing the conference attendees a close-up view of the building itself.

Celestia's real power is its ability to view astronomical things with an astounding precision. Searh the forum for some of Fridger Schrempp's comparisons to NASA photos of eclipses for example. You'll see that Celestia is dead on at recreating these things.

Cheers,
Joe

[Sam]

Thanks for your reply - I guess I didn't mean to imply that I would solely be focusing on Earth, just that that is where I will start - I am planning on showing all (or as much as I can) of Celestia's abilities, and am just looking for ideas. Thanks for the other programs though.
Sam

[selden]

Sam,

Have you looked at Frank Gregorio's educational lessons for use with Celestia? They're available at http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/educational.html

[DaveMc]

Sam,

Keeping your addons to an absolute minimum will help Celestia load and run much faster. You can drag any addons you aren't using in the presentation to a temp directory and drag them back when you're done.

Dave

[dirkpitt]

Honestly, if you are focusing on the earth, Google Keyhole or Worldwind is going to be far more impressive than Celestia.

Alas, these programs are Windows-only. World Wind is scrambling to get some sort of porting effort going,
but as it's written in C# it's going to be difficult. Microsoft makes a "cross-platform" language, then includes a
Windows-only gui framework thus making sure it only runs on Windows... typical Micro$oft. The darn System.Windows.Forms
alone is taking the best minds of the Mono open-source community more than 2 years to port to other platforms!

[Sam]

Thanks for your suggestions. I am trying to use Frank Gregario's Ed lessons - from what I've seen they're great. I think it's the add-ons that are bogging down the system, though, so I'm going to take a shot at de-activating some that hopefully aren't all-important, and see if that helps. I could probably present just those lessons and more than convince the teachers that this program is worth the effort. Thanks,
Sam

[fsgregs]

Sam, I think I can help. I've sent you a private post to discuss it.



Frank Gregorio