Celestia

[mmcirvin]

If pictures from space have only whetted your desire to fly around the universe unaided, know that there's a giant new release of Celestia out, with many clever new features. (My favorite is a new option to display the stars as discs scaled by magnitude like a star map, which greatly helps in getting oriented. The more photorealistic modes have the problem that a computer monitor doesn't have anything like the dynamic range of brightnesses of real objects in the sky, so you have to choose between stopping most stars down to invisibility or making it hard to pick out the familiar stars from the general chaos.)

Contrary to indications on the site, there is a preliminary Mac OS X port of version 1.3.1 graciously assembled by HankR, which you can get on the SourceForge page. Installation is as yet slightly awkward; follow the instructions in the readme file, and if the Moon and Mars look rainbow-colored, comment out all the "BumpMap" lines in ~/Library/Application Support/CelestiaResources/data/solarsys.ssc. This version fixes the longstanding Mac orbit display bug.