When I was around 12 or 13, I first got a hold of my stepfather’s physics text book. It was magic. The rules that governed the physical world were right there in the form of equations on a page. I was totally captivated. Newton’s laws of motion, gravity, angular momentum, and the theory of relativity. When I first learned about relativistic time dilation, it was life-changing. I resolved to become an astrophysicist. A lot of changes happened in my life that turned that dream into my current one. But, like all first loves, it never went away.
When I got my first computer, I had hopes of writing a program that would plot the positions of the stars as they were in space (3-D) versus how they appeared in the Earth’s sky (2-D). I achieved a little bit of success getting the vectors worked out from the distance, right ascension, declination and so on. I had no easy way of visualizing it though. Doing 3-D plots in BASIC back in 1990 wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. So that project died.
Then like a ghost, Celestia came to me last night. Wrapped up in her open source glory, I dared not even dream that she could perform what I had so long abandoned all hope of. But she did my friend, she did. (My wife won’t like this imagery :))
