Celestia/Installation

You can easily install Celestia on computers running Windows, macOS or Linux. If you are experienced in compiling programs from source code, you can also install it on computers running other operating systems. There are also mobile versions available on various app stores.

For computers, the current version of Celestia is available at the download page of Celestia's website. For mobile devices, the current version of Celestia can be downloaded from an app store, or from celestia.mobi.

Older versions of Celestia are also available from the archive on GitHub or the releases section of the current GitHub repository. In the past, Celestia's source code was hosted on SourceForge, and older versions may also be found there.

Prereleases of the next version of Celestia are announced on the Celestia Web Forum in its Development Sub-forum. If you build Celestia from source code, you can also generate a pre-release of Celestia v1.7 which is quite stable.

Windows

If you have downloaded the Windows version of the Celestia installation executable, then you simply need to run the .exe file that you downloaded. It will install Celestia wherever you specify.

Celestia works fine when installed in any version of Windows, from Vista through Windows 10. Celestia v1.6.1 and earlier also works on Windows XP.

Recommendations:

Vista and later versions of Windows, including Win7 through Win10, are particularly protective of software installed in the Program Files directory tree. You will have far fewer problems modifying Celestia if you install it somewhere else. You could, for example, create the directory C:\MyPrograms\ and install Celestia there. The installation program lets you browse to wherever you want to install it.

Note that if you already have a previous version of Celestia installed, the installer for v1.6.2 (the current version as of this writing) will try to install it in the same directory. This can be fixed by temporarily renaming the directory to "Celestia161" or similar.

Installing Celestia v1.7.0 pre-releases

An experimental Windows installer for Celestia v1.7.0 can be found here. On Windows 10, Celestia v1.7.0 can also be installed through the Microsoft Store, though this version has several limitations.

Alternatively, you can set up a pre-release version of Celestia v1.7.0 on Windows through GitHub. This requires some step-by-step instructions. You may need 7-Zip or a similar program to extract some of the files. You can also use the second step of these instructions to update the binaries in an existing install.

First, download the files from GitHub. Go to Celestia's GitHub repository and click the green "Code" button, then "Download ZIP", or if you have GitHub Desktop, "Open with GitHub Desktop". Make a folder somewhere (e.g. "C:\MyPrograms\") called "Celestia 1.7.0" or similar, and move the files there. You will also need to download the files from the CelestiaContent repository and put them in the same folder.

Second, download the binaries (i.e. the actual program). Currently, Windows builds of Celestia v1.7.0 are generated through GitHub Actions and require a GitHub account to download. Click on the latest build (at the top of the list), then under "Artifacts", click on either "celestia-x64" (64-bit) or "celestia-x86" (32-bit). Within the zip file, there will be a folder called "celestia", which contains three more zip files - "celestia-dep.7z", "celestia-qt.7z", & "celestia-win.7z". Extract all three of these, and move all files from the "RelWithDebInfo" folder of each zip file to your Celestia 1.7.0 folder.

Now you can run Celestia, either "celestia-qt.exe" or "celestia-win.exe". You may want to create a desktop shortcut to one of these.

Windows Vista-specific information

A few words of caution to Windows Vista users... (These may also apply to Windows 7.)

If you run the setup program as a Windows XP-compatible application, you'll find that the program runs fine and that Celestia operates as it should. You can also run the Celestia executable in the native Windows Vista mode too.

Savvy Windows XP users will find that there are a lot of things to get used to in the XP-compatible mode though. If you modify a planet texture, for example, you may find that your modified texture was NOT saved to the Celestia program directory where you got it from originally.

Vista likes to create shortcuts to modified textures, and these - for some reason - aren't readily available to the Celestia program. If you're using Windows Explorer to view the Celestia texture files, click on the "Compatibility Files" area at the top of your screen to see your modified texture. If you like, you can then copy and/or move the new texture to the C:\Program Files\Celestia\textures directory of your choice.

Recommendations:

Vista users should install Celestia as a native Vista program. When Celestia is installed as a previous version of Windows-compatible program, it simply causes more problems than it solves.

macOS

Celestia is provided for macOS in a disk image. Once you have downloaded the file, simply open it and then copy the application file "Celestia" from the window that shows up to the "Applications" folder, as for most applications in macOS.

Celestia can also be installed from the Mac app store - this is a beta version of Celestia v1.7.0.

Linux

The below information may be outdated; see the GitHub repository's INSTALL.md file for up-to-date information.

Every Linux distro does things a bit differently but the major ones do have some version of Celestia in their software repos.
For example:

fedora -- "yum install celestia"
-- but this is WITHOUT spice support

OpenSUSE -- "zypper in celestia"
-- also WITHOUT spice support

Debian -- "apt-get install celestia"

To be sure you have the most recent version of Celestia, you should consider building your own copy from source. Then consider contributing your results to the appropriate repo. Many repos have OLD versions in them since nobody has contributed an updated version. Some of the repos even have Celestia v1.5 in them. Celestia v1.6.1 was the last officially released version. If you build from source, you can generate a pre-release of v1.7, which is quite stable.

Few repos, if any, provide Celestia with SPICE support, so NO spice kernels will work if you install Celestia from an rpm or deb or xz.
Also there ARE NO prebuilt packages using qt 4 for KDE4, so no kde4 /qt 4 prebuilt rpm's, or deb's or xz's.

In the case of Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives, Celestia is split into free and non-free versions because of their strict interpretation of how licensing should be handled. Both are needed for Celestia to work properly.

Mobile

For mobile devices, the current version of Celestia can be downloaded from an app store, or from celestia.mobi.

Building from sourcecode

See Celestia/Development