Astronomy

Astronomy Software by Any Other Name

In this article, I introduce another option available for the astronomers out there—specifically, Cartes du Ciel, also known as SkyChart. Similar to other larger astronomy programs, you can use SkyChart from the desktop to the observatory.

Modeling the Entire Universe

For this article, I want to look at the largest thing possible, the whole universe. At least, that's the claim made by Celestia, the software package I'm introducing here. In all seriousness though, Celestia is a very well done astronomical simulator, similar to other software packages like Stellarium. Celestia is completely open source and is licensed under the GPL.

Astronomy on KDE

I recently switched to KDE and Plasma as my main desktop environment, so I thought I'd start digging into some of the scientific software available on KDE. First up is KStars, the desktop astronomy program. KStars probably won't be installed with the standard KDE desktop, so you may need to install it. If you're using a Debian-based distribution, you can install KStars with the following command:

Nightfall on Linux

I've looked at general astronomy programs in the past that are helpful for many tasks you might need to do in your stargazing career. But, several specific jobs are more complicated and require specialized software to make relevant calculations, so here, let's take a look at Nightfall.

Astronomy for KDE

Although I have covered a large number of science applications in the past, I haven't really looked at too many options available within the KDE desktop environment. This has been due to my own biases in using a GTK-based desktop environment, but now I'd like to look at some of the packages available for people who really like to use KDE on their own machines.