Celestia "lets you explore universe"

Celestia

The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

poppaping says : download this :

Celestia 1.6.1

Please select the appropriate Celestia 1.6.1 package for your computer from the list below. 

Downloads are all hosted by SourceForge, meaning you are required to select a download server after clicking on the link. As a result, right-clicking on a link and selecting "Save as..." may not work as expected.

• Windows
  The Windows package of Celestia is a self-extracting archive; download it to your computer and then run it.
  
• Mac OS X
  The Mac OS X package is a disk image. Download it to your computer, double click it, and follow the instructions in the README.
  
• Linux (x86) Version 1.4.1
  If you are running Linux, you should check first with your distribution; there is a good chance that the package is available to you in the format best suited to your installation. A pre-compiled 32-bit version is provided in the autopackage format. It should run on any distribution that has OpenGL and GTK+ 2.6.
  
• Source Code
  Celestia is an open-source project. As such, its source code is provided and is freely modifiable and redistributable as per the GNU Public License. Installation instructions are provided in the INSTALL file. 

The universe is created this day

MR.KEPLER

27 April 4977 BC : The universe is created, according to Kepler
On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets...more

On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.

Kepler was born on 27 December 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Germany. As a university student, he studied the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus' theories of planetary ordering. Copernicus (1473-1543) believed that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of the solar system, a theory that contradicted the prevailing view of the era that the sun revolved around the earth.

In 1600, Kepler went to Prague to work for Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, the imperial mathematician to Rudolf II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Kepler's main project was to investigate the orbit of Mars. When Brahe died the following year, Kepler took over his job and inherited Brahe's extensive collection of astronomy data, which had been painstakingly observed by the naked eye. Over the next decade, Kepler learned about the work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who had invented a telescope with which he discovered lunar mountains and craters, the largest four satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, among other things. Kepler corresponded with Galileo and eventually obtained a telescope of his own and improved upon the design.

In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion, which held that planets move around the sun in ellipses, not circles (as had been widely believed up to that time), and that planets speed up as they approach the sun and slow down as they move away. In 1619, he produced his third law, which used mathematical principles to relate the time a planet takes to orbit the sun to the average distance of the planet from the sun.

Kepler's research was slow to gain widespread traction during his lifetime, but it later served as a key influence on the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and his development of the law of gravitational force. Additionally, Kepler did important work in the fields of optics, including demonstrating how the human eye works, and mathematics. He died on 15 November 1630, in Regensberg, Germany. As for Kepler's calculation of the universe's age, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.

POPPAPING READ FROM :
http://www.history.co.uk/this-day-in-history/April-27.html;jsessionid=84FD6E2902C23E591151715235102C63