Celestia News

Chris Laurel Article Posted

  You've heard a lot about camickr around here (and you'll hear a lot more, too!) Now, let me introduce you to one of my all-time virtual open-source heroes: Chris Laurel. Chris is the creator of Celestia, a 3D space simulation that accurately models Keplerian orbits and parses entire star catalogs and accurately places stars in thier correct positions! You can virtually fly through space and visit tons of celestial bodies. I can't even do justice to everything Celestia does. I've provided lots of links so you can see for yourself. If you love astronomy, 3D graphics, C++ programming , mathematics and physics, you'll love Celestia!

  Oh, and by the way, Celestia is a completely open-source project available from sourceforge.net! The project was started by Chris back in 2001 and now contains more than 100,000 lines of code! Chris and his team of top developers have truly created a marvel of software design and implementation.

  Read my article and conversations with Chris and the small (almost trivial!), yet actual contribution I made to the Celestia codebase.(see A Conversation with Chris Laurel!)

  I want to say a big thank you to all of the developers and contributors to the Celestia project, especially Chris who has always been kind enough to respond to my neophyte emails! The Celestia project really takes the idea of "community" and open-source development to the level where I believe it should and can be. It's an example of "how it's done."

  By the way, I just compiled the latest version of Celestia's experimental Qt4 front-end (r4342) today. Here are some screenshots to feast your eyes upon... (Huygens[~630KB]| Calisto[~359KB])

I'll be talking more about C++ and the Qt4 Graphical libraries in the near future.

Thanks Chris et al!

- Brent P.