Celestia

[Harrison]

Has anyone used this free application?

Celestia is a Planetarium like software on a universe sized scale. You can explore planets, solar systems and whole constilations and nebela seemlessly.

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

The official download links for the latest version 1.6 appear to be down from sourceforge.net at the moment, but luckily some others are hosting temporary mirror download sites to file the gap.

http://full2down.com/softwares/2612-celestia-160.html

[Chewieshmoo]

Cool, gonna check it out..........

[Shoonay]

Has anyone used this free application?

Yup, with Stellarium and Google Earth those are my 3 favorite astronomy proggies.

[Harrison]

Have you managed to get Celestia to work with Vista? I'm running it using XP Pro at the moment because it refuses to run on Vista. It just throws up the following strange error.

"The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the Application event log for more detail."

Any ideas?

[Shoonay]

Of course, been using it on Vista x64 before and now on W7 x64 without any problems.
Well it did have some problems with graphic glitches but that was fixed in some update by nvidia.

Maybe you should run it as admin? (I've got all the UAC turned off completely)

[Harrison]

The first thing I always turn off in Vista is UAC. I hate it. So that isn't an issue.

I've tried running it as admin, but that doesn't change the error. I also tried running it in compatibility mode as XP SP2 and Win2000 and those didn't do anything either.

I'm wondering if it doesn't like my ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card?

[Shoonay]

Well, having in mind that it had problems with the nvidia drivers in the past, this might also a problem with lousy ATI driver programming, so maybe report the bug on ATI forums?