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.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth made news in 2002 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition and became the first South African to travel into space, paying $20 million to be a civilian cosmonaut on an eight-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. In 2004, he founded Ubuntu Linux to bring the operating system to people around the world.

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.

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.

The life of South African Mark Shuttleworth has been a kind of geek dream: found and sell Internet company for $500+ million in mid-20s; spend $20 million to become the second space tourist; and create a GNU/Linux distribution with a cool name that has become the most popular on the desktop.

He is, without a doubt, the only open source software leader who might be called “dashing.” Young (34), fabulously rich (north of $500 million as of 1999) Mark Shuttleworth buzzes around on his own private jet, the Canonical One. Raised in South Africa, in 2002 he launched the First African in Space mission, training as a cosmonaut and hitching a ride aboard a Russian spaceship.

"PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.