page_title: Celestia
section_title: Add-ons
hierarchical_section_title: Celestia / Add-ons
caption_attribution_description: Español: Muerte de la Tierra, dentro de 5 mil millones de años. English: Image of what Earth may look like 5-7 billion years from now, when the Sun swells and becomes a Red Giant. Русский: Художественное представление того, как может выглядеть Земля через 5-7 миллиардов лет, когда Солнце увеличится в диаметре и станет красным гигантом.
context_page_description: Celestia is a 3D astronomy software program created by Chris Laurel. The program allows users to virtually travel through a computer generated universe. Celestia can display objects of various scales using OpenGL.
  Celestia is available for AmigaOS 4, Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows, with beta versions for iOS and Android. It is free and open source software released under the GNU General Public License.
  Celestia's development stopped in 2013, with the final release in 2011. Since then, some of its development team went to work on Celestia.sci, a cosmological visualizer. In late 2016, the official Celestia forums were restored, and development restarted. As of 2020 beta testing builds of version 1.7.0 are available, as well as the bugfix release 1.6.2.
  Celestia is available for download from free software websites. Between 2001 and May 2017, the former central distribution site SourceForge counted approximately 12 million downloads.
context_section_description: Well over 10 GB of extensions are available in addition to the base program, produced by an active user community.
  Higher resolution surface textures are available for most solar system bodies, including Virtual Textures with coverage up to 32768 pixels wide (1.25 km/pixel at the Earth's equator), with selected coverage at higher resolutions. This allows closer views of the Earth, Mars, and the Moon. 3D models of historical and existing spacecraft are available flying in reasonably accurate trajectories, such as Sputnik 1, Voyager 2, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the International Space Station, as are extended data plots for stars (2 million with correct spatial coordinates), DSOs (nebulae, galaxies, open clusters, etc.), as well as catalogs of asteroids and comets, and more than 96,000 locations on the Earth can be drawn by the program. Add-ons also include space objects such as red and blue supergiants, red and brown dwarfs, neutron stars, spinning pulsars, rotating black holes with accretion disks, protostars, star nursery nebulae, supernova remnants, planetary nebulae, galactic redshifts, geological planetary displays (e.g. 3D interiors, topographic and bathymetric maps, paleogeography), planetary aurorae, rotating magnetic fields, animated solar prominences, 3D craters and mountains, and historic collision events.
  Numerous scripts are available. These include simple tours, reconstructions of complex space missions such as Cassini–Huygens and Deep Impact, and scripts showing useful information, like size comparisons, or particular events such as multiple simultaneous eclipses of Jupiter's moons or the evolution of a star.
  Fictional universes can be depicted, with planetary systems and 3D models—films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek and Star Wars, and TV shows including Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5. Add-ons illustrating less well-known Web fiction, like Orion's Arm, or role-playing games, like 2300 AD, and personal works by members of the Celestia community depicting fictional solar systems with inhabited worlds, spacecraft, cities, and special effects can also be added.
  Educational add-ons can also be implemented in different languages. These activities provide approximately 40 hours of space journeys and astronomical lessons to include extensive tours of the Celestia universe, the complete life cycle of stars, the solar system, the human space program, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and depictions of astronomical events such as the formation of our moon billions of years ago, and the possible terraforming of Mars in the future. 
  In late 2017, a large addon pack project called Celestia Origin was created, which replaces all vanilla textures and graphics with higher-quality renderings. In 2019, Celestia forum member FarGetaNik created an addon pack called Project Echoes, featuring higher-quality renderings that replace all vanilla textures.
caption: Possible Earth 5 billion years from now when the Sun goes red giant.
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