Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

This is a re-write of, and I hope an improvement on, an earlier posting about a program that deserves special attention.

Celestia is a free program that is so amazing that it is hard to believe it has been developed and offered as a free resource to the world. If your computer experience is limited, learning to use Celestia effectively may require some help from a friend. Still, I encourage you to download this incredible program and give it a test drive. Once you’ve downloaded and opened Celestia, go to the Help Menu and click on “Run Demo”.

Celestia (downloadable program) This is a “…free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions! 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.” This is super cool, and you can download this open source program and find out much more at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/. There are exciting add-ons and instructional units available from the “Motherlode”, but it requires a little computer savvy to install them. Entire educational units have been prepared for students in grades 7 – 12. A 46-page downloadable User’s Guide has been prepared by Frank Gregorio. Further support is available through forums hosted on Celestia’s website.

This program is cross-platform: Windows, Mac, Linux