Celestia Portable

the portable space simulator

Celestia Portable is the popular planetarium program packaged  Launcher as a portable app, so you can view the universe in 3-D anywhere. It has all the same great features as Celestia including 3-D planet viewing, viewing over 100,000 stars, traveling beyond our galaxy, and more. Plus, it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your favorite astronomy program with you wherever you go.

Download 1.6.0for Windows, Multilingual
33MB download / 63MB installed

Features

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Gallery

A view of Earth from far out in space.	A closeup of the space shuttle Discovery in orbit over Florida; this shot demonstrates Celestia's virtual texture feature for extremely high resolution mapping of planets.
Looking down at Mars's tiny moon Phobos and the giant Valles Marineris rift valley.	The 1989 flyby of Neptune by Voyager 2--last stop before leaving the solar system.
Saturn and its rings. Dark shadows cast by the rings are visible in the top hemisphere of Saturn.	Jupiter and its large moon Europa. The surface of Europa is mostly water ice and full of cracks created by tidal stresses.
The recently discovered extrasolar planet Rho Cancri e, one of a system of at least four planets. Rho Cancri b is visible just to the right of e.	The orbits of a number of main belt asteroids (in brown) plotted togeter with major planet orbits (in blue).

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Download Details

• Publisher:Linktohow and the Celestia Developers
• Date updated: 2009-08-15
• System Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista
• License: Free / Open Source (GPL)
• Source Code: launcher source (included), Celestia source
• MD5 Hash (for the geeks): ef57398ca8870a14b532372579f22202