John,
here is a shader bug in your code that announced itself as follows:
With the Earth being selected and the observer close by, I typed
5 g
to go to Jupiter. The latter appeared however as a uniformly red ball, indicating the crash.
Then going to /tmp and typing
ls -l celestia-shaders.log
revealed that the log file had just been generated . Here is the error part:
Code:
Error compiling fragment shader:
0:20(20): error: no matching function for call to `texture2DLod(sampler2D, vec2, float)'; candidates are:
0:20(20): error: type mismatch
0:20(11): error: operands to arithmetic operators must be numeric
0:20(1): error: operands to arithmetic operators must be numeric
0:20(1): error: could not implicitly convert error to float
Fixing this is not entirely easy...
I still have HD3000 on-board Intel graphics in my laptop and so has Dawoon.
A year ago, we spent quite some time fixing this sort of bugs since the intel HD3000 drivers still tend to be very buggy.
You may simply not encounter this bug for your NVIDIA setting. Fingers crossed

Cheers,
Fridger