Astronomy migration to Linux

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Thu Feb 22 16:33:38 UTC 2007


On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 12:07:12AM -0500, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> 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.
> 
> Begin Quote
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 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:

Why not Debian.  If you are breaking free of corporate control you might
as well go all the way.  And the stable releases really tend to be
stable releases with Debian.

> 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/

kstars seems neat, although I have no clue how accurate or useful it is
for someone that is actually in to things with astronomy.

> 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?

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists





More information about the Legacy mailing list