With all the help from major Linux distributions such as SuSE, Redhat and many others, Linux based systems are becoming easier to use. However, there is still some need of understanding of basic Unix skills to make the most of Linux. Thus, this HOWTO will assume that the reader has at least a basic knowledge of using a Unix system including the ability to compile and install programs.
Similarly, this is not a tutorial or reference for astronomy principles or astronomical instrumentation. Astronomy is perhaps the grandest of all sciences, employing widely disparate disciplines in a bold attempt to understand nothing less than the universe itself. Your interests will lead in many directions. A few references we have used include:
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<para>"Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac", P. Kenneth Seidelmann</para>
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<para>"Astronomy with your Personal Computer", Peter Duffett-Smith</para>
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<para>"Astronomy on the Personal Computer", Oliver Montenbruck et al</para>
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<para>"Textbook on Spherical Astronomy", W. M. Smart</para>
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<para>"The Astronomy and Astrophysics Encyclopedia", Stephen P. Maran, ed.</para>
The authors define the scope of this HOWTO as primarily an index to Linux tools applicable in some fashion to the pursuit of Astronomy. It is NOT our intention to list WWW astronomy references in general. Our own interests tend more toward the technology than the pure science and so we welcome contributions from others who have found Linux tools which contribute in other ways to Astronomy. Please contact us at the address above.
before major installation and backups at regular intervals.
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<title>Version</title>
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$Revision$
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$Date$
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The latest version of this document is always available on the <ulink url="http://astronomy.net/">Astronomy Net</ulink> at <ulink url="http://howto.astronomy.net/howto/">Astronomy HOWTO</ulink>.
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We eagerly accept suggestions from you. Send them to <ulink url="mailto:howto@astronomy.net">Astronomy HOWTO Editors</ulink>.
Copyright 2000-2007 by Elwood Downey and John Huggins. This document may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the LDP License except that this document must not be distributed in modified form without the author's consent.
A verbatim copy may be reproduced or distributed in any medium physical or electronic without permission of the author. Translations are similarly permitted without express permission if it includes a notice on who translated it. Commercial redistribution is allowed and encouraged; however please notify authors of any such distributions.
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Excerpts from the document may be used without prior consent provided that the derivative work contains the verbatim copy or a pointer to a verbatim copy.
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Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document provided the copyright notice, the list of authors and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
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In short, we wish to promote dissemination of this information through as many channels as possible. However, we wish to retain copyright on this HOWTO document, and would like to be notified of any plans to redistribute this HOWTO. For information about translations of this document, please see below.
Progga - Helped us get this document into modern times by converting the older linuxdoc to docbook.
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<title>Translations</title>
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Since Astronomy is very much an international effort, we encourage translation of this HOWTO into any language. We only ask the following:
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<para>If you are a translator, please contact us at the above address so we may give proper credit here. This way, readers will immediately see what translations are available and see where to get them.</para>
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<para>Please obtain the latest copy of the Astronomy HOWTO from its home at <ulink url="http://howto.astronomy.net/">Astronomy Net</ulink> before you begin your translation effort.</para>
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We thank the following for their translation efforts:
Elwood Downey has over two decades experience in software engineering for various astronomy projects. Mr. Downey is currently the software and systems engineer for the <ulink url="http://www.mro.nmt.edu/2.4m/">Nasmyth Telescope</ulink> in New Mexico. Learn more about Elwood at <ulink url="http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/resumes/ecdowney/resume.html">Clear Sky Institute</ulink>.
John Huggins has over twenty years experience in hardware engineering including eight years associated with an astronomy observatory project. He also maintains a twelve year old popular astronomy web site called <ulink url="http://www.astronomy.net/">www.astronomy.net</ulink>; It includes forums, AstroGuide and astronomy articles. Learn more about John at <ulink url="http://www.johnhuggins.com/resume/">John's Site</ulink>.
<ulink url="http://bima.astro.umd.edu/nemo/linuxastro/astromake/">AstroMake</ulink> is a utility intended to make installations of some common astronomical packages (in binary form) easy.
<ulink url="http://www.comsoc.org/vancouver/scieng.html">Scientific Applications on Linux (SAL), Physics and Astronomy</ulink>
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<ulink url="http://www.eso.org/science/scisoft/">Scisoft</ulink> is a project within ESO to provide a collection of astronomical software utilities, mostly public domain tools developed outside ESO, in a uniform way at all four ESO sites. Major data-analysis packages (eg, IRAF/STSDAS, ESO-MIDAS and IDL) are included as well as many smaller utilities.
The linuxastro mailing list also contains a list of applications and packages. For more information, see <ulink url="http://bima.astro.umd.edu/nemo/linuxastro/">linuxastro</ulink>.
<para><ulink url="http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/">XEphem</ulink> has been the pet project of one of us (Downey) for the past twenty-odd years. It has grown to become one of the more capable interactive tools for the computation of astronomical ephemerides.
<para><ulink url="http://www.astrotrf.net:8080/xsky_blurb.html">XSky</ulink> is by Terry R. Friedrichsen, terry@venus.sunquest.com. XSky is essentially an interactive sky atlas.
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<para><ulink url="http://edu.kde.org/kstars/">KStars</ulink> is a Desktop Planetarium for KDE.
<ulink url="http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/skymap.html">Skymap</ulink> is an astronomical mapping program written in Fortran and C for Unix workstations by Doug Mink of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Telescope Data Center.
<ulink url="http://www.icewalkers.com/Linux/Software/55990/Nightfall.html">Nightfall</ulink> is an astronomy application for fun, education, and science. It can produce animated views of eclipsing binary stars, calculate synthetic light curves and radial velocity curves, and eventually determine the best-fit model for a given set of observational data of an eclipsing binary star system.
<para>Started in summer 2001 just as a simple collection of celestial mechanics C++ classes, the <ulink url="http://orsa.sourceforge.net/">ORSA</ulink> project now collects many general classes, a graphical interface running under Linux/Unix, Mac OS X and Windows, and a number of tutorial programs. The ORSA project is under heavy development, and at the moment is beta quality software.</para>
Astronomical Information Processing System (AIPS) is the heavy iron used by professional astronomers. <ulink url="http://aips2.nrao.edu/docs/aips++.html">AIPS++</ulink> is the place to find out more, but note that <ulink url="http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/aips/">AIPS Classic</ulink> also exists and is actively maintained.
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Good ol' <ulink url="http://www.gimp.org/">GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)</ulink> is a fine program to use for processing of digital images of all kinds and can prove useful for astro images as well.
<ulink url="http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/numarray/">Numarray</ulink> provides array manipulation and computational capabilities similar to those found in IDL, Matlab, or Octave. Using numarray, it is possible to write many efficient numerical data processing applications directly in Python without using any C, C++ or Fortran code (as well as doing such analysis interactively within Python or PyRAF).
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<ulink url="http://numpy.scipy.org/">NumPy</ulink> is the successor to Numarray. STScI is in the process of migrating all of its software to use numpy, and the next release of stsci_python and STSDAS/TABLES will use numpy in place of numarray.
<ulink url="http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~mgh/WindowMaker/DockApps.shtml">wmMoonClock</ulink> shows lunar ephemeris to fairly high accuracy and is listed at this web site along with several other interesting programs. THIS LINK APPEARS DEAD AND MIGHT BE DELETED SOON.
<ulink url="http://www.paganlink.org/downloads/astronomy/xvmoontool.html">XVMoontool</ulink> is an XView application which displays information about the Moon in real time.
<ulink url="http://www.flaterco.com/xtide/">XTide</ulink> is a package that provides tide and current predictions in a wide variety of formats. Graphs, text listings, and calendars can be generated, or a tide clock can be provided on your desktop.
<para><ulink url="http://rlspc5.bnsc.rl.ac.uk/star/docs/sun67.htx/sun67.html#xref_">SLALIB</ulink>, part of the <ulink url="http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/">Starlink Project</ulink>, is a complete library of subroutines for astrometric computations. NEWS 2007 - The Starlink Project is no longer in development, however community support is available in some fashion <ulink url="http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/">here</ulink>.
<para><ulink url="http://www.google.com/search?q=Orbit+linux+space+fighter">Orbit</ulink> - Be a space fighter pilot in Windows or Linux. NEWS 2007 - the original site domain appears to have been lost, but archive copies are on the Internet. The link has been changed to a Google search URL.</para>
<para><ulink url="http://iraf.noao.edu/">IRAF</ulink> is a gigantic but exceptionally capable astronomical analysis system, shepherded over the past 20-odd years by Doug Tody formally at NOAO. It has accumulated innumerable authoritative contributions from leading astronomers in all areas of astronomical data analysis. If you have a serious interest in astronomical data reduction and significant time to invest, this system will reward you mightily.
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<ulink url="http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyraf/">PyRAF</ulink> is a new command language for running IRAF tasks that is based on the Python scripting language. It gives users the ability to run IRAF tasks in an environment that has all the power and flexibility of Python.
<ulink url="http://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/">Clear Sky Clock</ulink> will show at a glance when we might expect clear and dark skies for one particular observing site.
The <ulink url="http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/">Simbad</ulink> astronomical database provides basic data, cross-identifications and bibliography for astronomical objects outside the solar system.
<para><ulink url="http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~dursi/dm-tutorial/cluster-sim.html">Cluster simulator</ulink> NEWS 2007 - WE CANNOT VERIFY THIS PROGRAM - DELETION SCHEDULED</para>
<para><ulink url="http://www.phys.vt.edu/~jhs/SIP/">Sky Image Processor</ulink> an astronomical image processing program which runs over the Web. Hosted at Virginia Tech.</para>
The yearly <ulink url="http://www.adass.org/">Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems, ADAAS,</ulink> Conference Series provides a forum for scientists and computer specialists concerned with algorithms, software and operating systems in the acquisition, reduction and analysis of astronomical data. The program includes invited talks, contributed papers and poster sessions as well as user group meetings and special interest meetings ("BOFs''). All these activities aim to encourage communication between software specialists and users, and also to stimulate further development of astronomical software and systems.
The linuxastro mailing list, linuxastro@majordomo.cv.nrao.edu, is for people who are interested in porting astronomical software to linux. For more information, see <ulink url="http://bima.astro.umd.edu/nemo/linuxastro/">linuxastro</ulink>.
<ulink url="http://ktelescope.sourceforge.net/">KTelescope</ulink> is a robust Client/Server control library for Meade's LX200 based telescopes. It uses the Instrument Neutral Distributed Interface (INDI) protocol.
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<ulink url="http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/INDI/INDI.pdf">INDI</ulink> is an
instrument-neutral distributed interface for operating any remote device over
a reliable byte stream interface. There is an active group writing an
expanding list of drivers for astronomy related equipment including telescopes
<ulink url="http://www.sbig.com/sbwhtmls/linux_announcement.htm">SBIG</ulink> offers some assistance with operating their ST7 and ST8 CCD cameras under Linux.
<ulink url="http://dim.com/~ashe/ccd-astro.html">CCD Astronomy on Linux</ulink> These pages describe a number of facets of using astronomical CCD cameras for image acquisition and processing under Linux.
is a gnome-based CCD camera and filter wheel control program.
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<sect1 id="installhelp">
<title>Installation Help</title>
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You need to know what you're doing with Linux and installing programs, but help is available for some programs. Here are some ways to make life easier.
XEphem requires several elements to exist on your machine. Life is much simpler with the CDROM version of the program as it contains an installation script which loads the appropriate pre-compiled binary for most systems and places all auxiliary files to the correct spots. See Purchase at <ulink url="http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/">XEphem</ulink>
Here is a list of astronomy projects using Linux in whole or in part of their instrumentation:
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<ulink url="http://www.chara.gsu.edu/CHARA/index.html">The CHARA Array</ulink> is an optical interferometer project using Linux in their control system.
In an effort to record a history of the evolution of this document, we maintain it within a CVS repository. What follows is the steps to today's document.