The available version of celestia under OSX lacks a numer of functionalities present in the Unix version. Most especially, I think that Lua is not compiled in, so you cannot use the latest educational activities.

I have been able to install the latest (X11, gnome or KDE) Celestia with fink with no problem, with support for everything and it seems to go as fast as the OSX one (that is, on my TiBook/400, slow).

You want to see slow? You should try it on a B&W G3!

But, it is an awesomely cool program, and my three-year-old daughter loves it ("Daddy, let's play planets!"). We were at the Space and Rocket center in Huntsville, AL last weekend and they had a kiosk set up, running it on a Dell peecee with a customized keypad and flight stick... really neat, but they could have done a better job of placing it and promoting the Celestia development team.

Speaking of features, I noticed that the Windows version will export movies [and images]. I don't see a feature like that in the OSX version.

I'm really glad to learn about this program -- thanks for the original hint! I was up all night exploring the universe.

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osxpounder