Expand your horizons
What better way to curb your Google Earth addiction and procrastinate even more: the open source program Celestia lets you get out of Earth’s orbit and into the far reaches of space. It supports high-quality hardware rendering, smooth flyovers, animated tours, and many other visual goodies.
Although it comes with a generous collection of stars, planets, and moons (oh my!), you’ll eventually get bored of all that. Fortunately, there’s a huge collection of freely downloadable extensions that can add more stars, planets, satellites, tours… even whole galaxies! (And Star Wars and Star Trek fans will be heartened to know that there’s plenty of fodder for them available, too.)
Celestia is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. A newer test version is available for Windows.
Also, let me take this paragraph to point out that there’s a new Dorm Favorites (Links) page. Once you have an account here, you can easily add to the list by clicking the Edit My Blogroll link in MT. Speaking of which, I’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain up the staircase pretty soon to get all of you accounts. It’s really easy: you just tell me your e-mail address, and I let you type your password into the system.