Celestia is a free opensource space simulation software that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia provides photo-realistic, real-time, three-dimensional viewing of the solar system, the galaxy and the universe and has become a valuable tool for education in Astronomy.

a couple of newer entries on the Linux astronomy scene: Stellarium and Celestia use hardware graphics acceleration.

While it may not let you go where no man has gone before, Celestia is an amazing desktop application that lets you go anywhere in the known Universe.You can view any object in the Solar System, travel to distant stars, and even leave the Galaxy, traveling faster than the speed of light, viewing high-res images of objects millions of miles away.

Celestia is a real-time space simulation which lets you experience the universe in three dimensions. Celestia does not confine you to the
surface of the Earth only, but Celestia allows you to travel throughout the entire solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

What's that super-bright star in the western sky after sunset? Was the moon full last night? Is Mars visible now? What time will the sun set on Saturday? Do you ever look up at the sky and wonder about it? Your Linux desktop has lots of astronomy programs that can help you explore the night sky. This article will start with the one that's easiest to use: KStars.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth spent about $20 million to go into space, and he never got farther away from Earth than a few hundred miles. Using three free software programs, you can look at and virtually travel to places millions of miles away without leaving your GNU/Linux desktop or paying a dime.

If I had to choose only one tool to learn or teach Astronomy, it would be Celestia. Celestia is a program that lets you get up close and personal with the planets and their moons, asteroids, stars and galaxies. You can even follow the International Space Station as it orbits the earth. Celestia runs on Linux, Windows and Mac and requires OpenGL.

I’ve blogged before how I think Gtk applications are superior to their Qt counterparts, but since I’m using KDE pretty much exclusively since October last year, I’m always on the lookout for good Qt apps.

Celestia is a real-time visual space simulation astronomy program. NASA and ESA have used Celestia in their educational and for interfacing to trajectory analysis software.