OMG, it's full of stars...

[ffutures]

Probably old news to some of you, but I'd never heard of it before; Celestia is an open-source astronomy program that tries to do for astronomy what Google Earth does for geography. Zoom in on planets and speed up their rotation, zoom out and see the galaxy, etc. etc. There are versions for Windows, Mac OS-X and Linux, and you can download the source code, also lots of add-ons available, an educational version, etc.

The Windows version is a 16mb download, just about runs on the 400mhz XP box I use at work and is like greased lightning on a 2 ghz machine. Amazingly pretty, and very strongly recommended

http://www.shatters.net/celestia

Comments

[wpeters.livejournal.com]

There are also a lot of plugin models of various space ships to download and plugin. From hyper-real models of the International Space Station and Space Shuttle to the Starship Enterprise and Moonbase Alpha etc...
I myself have made a model of a Suleiman Scout-Courier Wedgie from Traveller that Orbits Earth.

[lawbag.livejournal.com]

I think a couple of people have even done Star Trek and Firefly add-ons - be nice to find them and see them in action

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

I used to enjoy playing around with the Babylon 5 universe plug-in. If I ever get around to running my Starship Troopers vs The Daleks game, I'll be doing the maps using Celestia.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Starship troopers versus the Daleks...

Works for me