Brand new user with some questions!

[jojimbo]

Hello all, I'm a new user to Celestia, in fact i just downloaded it last night. I saw that there was a spaceflight feature and wanted to get right into that, i downloaded a user created Atlantis spacecraft and restarted the program. I copied it into the extras folder as the read-me told me too, and when i started celestia, nothing had changed, any suggestions?

[selden]

I'm not sure what you mean by a "spaceflight feature". I suspect Celestia does not have it, though. You might want to investigate Orbiter, which really does simulate spaceflight, from launch into orbit, through interplanetrary trajectories with mid-flight corrections, to orbiting around and landing on remote planets.

See http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html

Celestia has a few controls that make the viewpoint travel at specific speeds through space. You also can use a joystick to control the viewpoint, although it seems to have problems with some types of joysticks. The Controls entry on the Help menu lists some of the commands. You might also consider reading the Celestia Users Manual, which shows how to use Celestia. It's on the CelestiaMotherlode at
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catal ... ation.html

Addons for Celestia define objects in fixed orbits that you can go look at. If you added the Atlantis spacecraft, you can now use a GoTo command to go see it. You can't use Celestia to fly it around.

(The next release of Celestia v1.5.0 makes it possible to change the orientation of objects while Celestia is running. It might be able to change their orbits, but that isn't clear, yet. "Possible" does not mean "easy".)

[jojimbo]

Thanks a lot for the info, I appreciate it. This is a great tool, I'm going to show it to my next semester astronomy teacher!