Number 285 - February 2007

Astronomy Programs
by Stacey C. Falconer, Big Blue and Cousins, Greater Victoria PC Users' Assoc, December 2006
Two of my favorite open source programs are Open Universe and Stellarium.    Open Universe is an older application, and has been replaced by Celestia. All three of these programs are available freely over the internet, and are available for MS-Windows users.    It all came out of my interest in Linux, and particularly the live-CD versions, and my interest in making telescopes. I suppose some of you could have guessed it by my article in the BB&C June 2006 newsletter titled Hale to the Telescope www.bbc.org/newsletter/jun06nl/hale.html.    First there was the Linux programs starplot and kstars. Starplot I found in a SuSE Linux distribution. It is a star plot program, showing the positions of the nearby stars in three dimensions. Next was kstars, and that was a planetarium show. I fondly remember my first planetarium show in the mid '60s at the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium in Edmonton.    It wasn't until I started exploring the Linux live CDs that I came across Stellarium. Stellarium is a true planetarium program, which allows you to observe the night sky from any place on the earth, and can fast forward or reverse to show the sky, keeping track of the planets, countless thousands of years into the future or the past. The navigation and menu keys are displayed on the desktop, and quite un-obtrusively.    Open Universe is more than a planetarium show: let's take a walk in space. Though it has been replaced by Celestia, it is still a great trip through the Solar System. In Stellarium's case, the keyboard is the navigation instrument, with the function keys determining if you are seeing the planet in orbit, relative from the sun, or tracking from a single point. Home/End keys go to the	next/previous body, and the keypad +/- keys toggle the time increments per frame. Ctl-Z zooms out while shift-Ctl-Z zooms in to the object. H toggles the help file. Most of the image maps for the planetary moons and asteroids are reasonably current, though could be updated.    In order to run these programs without having your computer slow down to a dead crawl requires that you make sure that you have the accelerated video card drivers installed.    Stellarium is available from www.stellarium.org/ , in Linux (source), Windows, and Mac formats. The Linux source format is the source code and must be compiled, though most Linux package managers will go out onto the web and easily download and install the binaries. In a Debian system, it is as simple as using Synaptic or Kpackage, or using the root shell command: apt-get install stellarium. It may even come as a binary package on a Linux CD.    Open Universe can be downloaded from: www.openuniverse.org    For Windows users, it is a simple download and an install. For Linux users, I'd suggest doing the apt-get install openuniverse install over the web instead of compiling the source code.    So, for those of you who enjoy going out into the night sky and looking up into the starry firmament: Enjoy!    Copyright (C) 1990-2006 by Big Blue and Cousins: The Greater Victoria Personal Computer Users' Association. www.bbc.org
Number 285 - February 2007