Astronomy migration to Linux

Thu Feb 22 05:07:12 UTC 2007

This is an email in the RASC newsgroup regarding migrating to Vista vs
using Linux. It would seem that many of the programs used to do amateur
astronomy are available for Linux or run under Wine.

I think we're going to see a lot of this type of migration, even in
specialized fields such as this one.

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I have made the big jump to Linux because of Vista. I ran Vista log
enough to know its bad news. I am not going to try and start a debate
that is off topic. I merely ask anyone who considers moving to Vista to
read the following link first:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
If you wish to talk about this part of my email, please do so by
emailing me off list.

The main reason I have replied to this email is the question of changing
OSes and what astronomy and science software is available. I am now
using Fedora Core 6 and have happily made the transition from Win32,
almost completely. As with Vista, there are new things to learn and
software alternatives to be found. For astronomy and imaging I have
found and have been using the following in Linux:

Stellarium is a cross platform planetarium program that is very good for
demonstrating the sky and how things look. Its a nice free program to
have in any OS.
http://www.stellarium.org/

Celestia is another great program, does some things no other program
does very well, especially for free.
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

Want to get more detailed free star chart program? Again another free
and highly regarded program is Carte du Ciel (Skychart). It works in
Linux, windows, and Mac OS X.
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/

I really like the Linux only program KStars. It has been mentioned here
before. It is very well done and also has live connections to image
databases for displaying real images. It is also free, and runs on a
free OS. It has a telescope control interface too.
http://edu.kde.org/kstars/

For controlling Canon cameras there is a utility called multican. There
are many image transfer and image editing programs and Linux and image
editing can now be done in 16 bit and with colour space awareness too.
The best of these are The Gimp (8 bit only), Cinepaint up to 32 bit,
Lightzone handles raw too, UFRaw and Raw Studio for adjusting raw
images, all for free.

There are two notable pay programs for Linux for image editing; Bibble
Pro which costs $125 US and Pixel which costs $38 right now.

There are programs worth running in Linux that aren't meant for Linux.
They can be run in what is called WINE. WINE stands for Wine Is Not an
Emulator. Registax and IRIS both seem to run fine.

I also found one other interesting program called xephem, but I can't
get it to compile yet due to some dependency missing I think.

Any other programs out there anyone would like to share?

Les Nagy
Hamilton Centre

_______________________________________________
rascals-ETbvJ2rUIr4Zq07fGvhYvA at public.gmane.org --- http://crux.stmarys.ca/mm21/listinfo/rascals

-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
http://www.syscompdesign.com
USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
647-839-0325

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