[10] Since then, some of its development team went to work on celestia.Sci,[11] a cosmological visualizer featuring more realistic rendering of galaxies and planets, gravitational lensing, and many other scientifically accurate enhancements, but there have been no updates on the progress of the program since 2020.

[citation needed] Celestia simulates the appearance of atmospheres on planets and moons, planetshine on orbiting satellites, and miscellaneous planetary details such as sunrise and sunset.

Information about the objects that Celestia draws can also be displayed, such as temperature, distance from observer, radius, rotational period, luminosity, and more.

The user can change Celestia's field of view, and the window can be split into multiple different panes, meaning that several objects can be displayed on the screen at once.

Additionally, moons smaller than 0.5% of their parent objects' size do not cast shadows at all, as the original development team decided that they would be too small to be relevant.

3D models of historical and existing spacecraft are available flying in reasonably accurate trajectories, such as Sputnik 1, Voyager 2, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the International Space Station, as are extended data plots for stars (2 million with correct spatial coordinates), DSOs (nebulae, galaxies, open clusters, etc.

Add-ons also include other objects such as red and blue supergiants, red and brown dwarfs, neutron stars, spinning pulsars, rotating black holes with accretion disks, protostars, Wolf-Rayet stars, star nursery nebulae, supernova remnants, planetary nebulae, galactic redshifts, geological planetary displays (e.g. 3D interiors, topographic and bathymetric maps, paleogeography), planetary aurorae, rotating magnetic fields, animated solar prominences, 3D craters and mountains, and historic collision events (Either spacecraft such as Deep Impact and DART, or meteoric impacts such as the Chelyabinsk meteor).

These include simple tours, reconstructions of complex space missions such as Cassini–Huygens and Deep Impact, and scripts showing useful information, like size comparisons, or particular events such as multiple simultaneous eclipses of Jupiter's moons or the evolution of a star.

Add-ons illustrating less well-known internet fiction, like Orion's Arm, or role-playing games, like 2300 AD, and personal works by members of the Celestia community depicting fictional planetary systems with inhabited worlds, spacecraft, cities, and special effects can also be added.

These activities provide approximately 40 hours of space journeys and astronomical lessons to include extensive tours of the Celestia universe, the complete life cycle of stars, the Solar System, the human space program, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and depictions of astronomical events such as the formation of the Moon billions of years ago, and the possible terraforming of Mars in the future.

[26][note 3] In mid 2016, a large addon pack project called Celestia Origin was created, which replaces all vanilla textures and graphics with higher-quality renderings, adds more minor objects such as TNOs and asteroids, while also adding more extrasolar planets with custom textures, more nebulae with full 3D and accurate models, more stars and galaxies, more star clusters, more spacecraft, and a ton of more enhancements.

[27][28] In 2019, Celestia Forum member FarGetaNik created an addon pack called Project Echoes, featuring higher-quality renderings that replace all vanilla textures.

NASA and ESA have used Celestia in their educational[30] and outreach programs,[31] as well as for interfacing to trajectory analysis software.

Character Timothy McGee explains what Celestia is and how an add-on can allow the user to store a diary within the program, as well.

Textures designed by Celestia graphic artists were used in the movie The Day After Tomorrow and the 2008 miniseries The Andromeda Strain.

Eurogamer's Jim Rossignol named Celestia among a top 20 list of Summer of PC Freeware games in 2006.