On Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:25:42 -0500, Jim wrote:

Tom Francis - SWSports wrote:
On Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:45:42 -0600, thunder
wrote:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

I had forgotten about that one - I have it, but haven't used it in
quite a while.
..
I just took a peek at celestia it looks like a good piece of software.
How would you rate it against Stellarium?

Oh gosh - it's been a while. When I used it last, the base gazing
software is very cool and does what it's supposed to do. The planet
fly-bys and various space craft seem a little gimmicky to me, but I do
like the photo realistic closeups. I'm not knocking it, but I like
the plain old Stellarium package out of the box. The odd thing is I
like it better than Starry Nights which is a pretty good program for
just gazing.

I have several professional level auto-ranging programs for my
Celestron so I can track satellites, the Space Lab and the shuttle
flights automatically. Stellarium ranks right up there in terms of
graphics - in some ways it's better.

If you haven't discovered the zoom keys in stellarium yet, they are page
up and page down.

I found it, but I haven't played with it much yet - I was bouncing
back and forth between programs comparing graphics. :)

I really like this program. For shareware, it's a good one - enough
to pay for it in my opinion.