Install celestia on Ubuntu 16.04

I haven't tried it, but you can try to install it after downloading the package (and all its dependencies!) for Wily from here.

The answer provided by dadexix86 works and if you want to check the checksums of the packages for security (since the packages aren't being installed by apt, their integrity is not automatically checked (I think)), it's probably best to do everything manually.

However, for a simple copy-paste solution, the following bash commands should do the job (assuming you have a 64-bit, standard, fresh Ubuntu 16.04 installation):

UBUNTU_MIRROR=https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/celestia

# common
sudo apt-get install liblua5.1-0
wget "${UBUNTU_MIRROR}"/celestia-common_1.6.1+dfsg-3_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i celestia-common_1.6.1+dfsg-3_all.deb

sudo apt-get install celestia-common-nonfree

# for celestia-glut
wget "${UBUNTU_MIRROR}"/celestia-glut_1.6.1+dfsg-3_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install freeglut3
sudo dpkg -i celestia-glut_1.6.1+dfsg-3_amd64.deb

# for celestia-gnome
wget "${UBUNTU_MIRROR}"/celestia-gnome_1.6.1+dfsg-3_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install libgtkglext1 libgnome2-0 libgnomeui-0
sudo dpkg -i celestia-gnome_1.6.1+dfsg-3_amd64.deb

This includes the dependencies (installed using apt from Xenial) and celestia-common-nonfree (also installed from Xenial).

Celestia development looks like it's started again. This is a compile from source process. With some more encouragement we may get some new binary installs happening.

Here you can find Linux build instructions and here you can download the source

I Installed the NAIF cspice from here as per above instructions.

tldr;

just download, unpack and point to the location in the ./configure command below:

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit.

sudo apt install qt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev 

Then cd to your downloaded/unpacked Celestia source, and ...

autoreconf -v -i # might need to run ? if configure fails 
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-lua --with-qt --with-cspice-dir=/YourInstallLocation/NGT/cspice

make
sudo make install

Then..

celestia