Debian Science Astronomy packages

The aa program computes the orbital positions of planetary bodies and performs rigorous coordinate reductions to apparent geocentric and topocentric place (local altitude and azimuth). It also reduces star catalogue positions given in either the FK4 or FK5 system. Data for the 57 navigational stars is included. Most of the algorithms employed are from The Astronomical Almanac (AA) published by the U.S. Government Printing Office.

The aa program follows the rigorous algorithms for reduction of celestial coordinates exactly as laid out in current editions of the Astronomical Almanac. The reduction to apparent geocentric place has been checked by a special version of the program (aa200) that takes planetary positions directly from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory DE200 numerical integration of the solar system. The results agree exactly with the Astronomical Almanac tables from 1987 onward (earlier Almanacs used slightly different reduction methods).

Certain computations, such as the correction for nutation, are not given explicitly in the AA but are referenced there. In these cases the program performs the full computations that are used to construct the Almanac tables (references are provided).

The goal of Milkyway@Home is to use the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources in creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.

In computer science, the project is investigating different optimization methods which are resilient to the fault-prone, heterogeneous and asynchronous nature of Internet computing; such as evolutionary and genetic algorithms, as well as asynchronous newton methods. While in astroinformatics, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

This package contains the Milkyway@home application for the BOINC distributed computing platform. Note that this package has been primarily created for users of architectures for which Milkyway@home does not provide its application. If your architecture is x86 or AMD64 the BOINC client automatically downloads the latest Milkyway@home application if you participate in this project. There is no need to install this package then.

SETI@home is a distributed computing project using Internet-connected computers for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). It searches for possible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in radio transmissions collected by the Arecibo radio telescope.

This package contains the SETI@home Enhanced application for the BOINC distributed computing platform. The BOINC client downloads the radio data which the SETI@home application analyzes looking for signals of extraterrestrial origin. Results are then send back to the SETI@home server by the BOINC client.

Note that this package has been primarily created for users of architectures for which SETI@home does not provide its application. If your architecture is x86 or AMD64 the BOINC client automatically downloads the latest SETI@home application if you participate in this project. There is no need to install this package then.

Celestia is a free 3D astronomy program. Based on the Hipparcos Catalogue, it allows users to display objects ranging in scale from artificial satellites to entire galaxies in three dimensions using OpenGL. Unlike most planetarium software, the user is free to travel about the Universe.

This is a dummy package that selects at least one frontend for Celestia.

Fv provides a graphical user interface to data stored in FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files. Local files can be created, viewed and edited, files on the internet can be opened read-only through the http and ftp protocols. Through the POWplot program, FITS data can be visualized in a large variety of styles. An interface to the SkyView online database allows for searching, downloading, and plotting of images and object lists for a region of the sky.

Gcx is an astronomical image processing and data reduction tool, with an easy to use graphical user interface. It provides a complete set of data reduction functions for CCD photometry, with frame WCS fitting, automatic star identification, aperture photometry of target and standard stars, single-frame ensemble photometry solution finding, multi-frame color coefficient fitting, extinction coefficient fitting, and all-sky photometry; as well as general-purpose astronomical image processing functions (bias, dark, flat, frame alignment and stacking); It can function as a FITS viewer.

The program can control CCD cameras and telescopes, and implement automatic observation scripting. Cameras are controlled through a hardware-specific server, to which gcx connects through a TCP socket. It generates FITS files with comprehensive header information.

Gpredict is a real time satellite tracking program for GNOME, based on the tracking engine of John Magliacane's excellent satellite tracker Predict.

Gpredict includes the following features:

• Tracking an infinite number of satellites limited only by the physical memory and processing power of the computer.
• Display the tracking data in lists, maps, polar plots or any combination of these.
• You can have many modules open at the same time, either in a notebook or in their own windows. The module can also run in full-screen mode.
• You can use many ground stations. Ground station coordinates can be entered manually or you can get some approximate values from a list with more than 2000 predefined locations worldwide.
• Predict upcoming passes for satellites, including passes where a satellite may be visible and communication windows open.
• Very detailed information about both the real time data and the predicted passes.
• Gpredict can run in real-time, simulated real-time (fast forward and backward), and manual time control.
• Doppler tuning of radios via Hamlib rigctld.
• Antenna rotator control via Hamlib rotctld.

KStars is a desktop planetarium for KDE, depicting an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes 130,000 stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects, all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets and asteroids. It includes tools for astronomical calculations and can control telescopes and cameras.

This package is part of the KDE education module.

FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) is a data format most used in astronomy. cfitsio is a library of ANSI C routines for reading and writing FITS format data files. A set of Fortran-callable wrapper routines are also included for the convenience of Fortran programmers.

This package contains what you need to run programs that use this library.

Light Speed! is an OpenGL-based program which illustrates the effects of special relativity on the appearance of moving objects. When an object accelerates past a few million meters per second, these effects begin to grow noticeable, becoming more and more pronounced as the speed of light is approached. These relativistic effects are viewpoint-dependent, and include shifts in length, object hue, brightness and shape.

The moving object is, by default, a geometric lattice. 3D Studio and LightWave 3D objects may be imported as well. Best of all, the simulator is completely interactive, rendering the exotic distortions in real-time!

This is an application dedicated to the processing of astronomical (mainly planetary) images taken with a webcam through a telescope. It was created on Mac OS X.

OpenUniverse (OU for short) is a fun, fast and free OpenGL space simulator. It currently focuses on the Solar System and lets you visit all of its planets, most major moons and a vast collection of smaller bodies in colorful, glorious and realtime 3D. If you've ever had a chance to visit Mercury or asteroid Geographos, here you'll find them looking exactly the same way, following exactly the same path as when you've left them.

Notice that OpenUniverse is not actively being maintained anymore and that users are recommended to use Celestia instead.

This is a satellite tracking program. It is probably mostly of interest to users of amateur satellites, but includes support for optionally announcing azimuth and elevation to help in manual antenna pointing, or optical observation of satellites.

The upstream predict sources include a front-end called 'map', which is called predict-map in the Debian package.

The 'ntp' package is suggested because accurate satellite tracking depends on precise knowledge of ground station time and location.

qfits is a stand-alone library written in C to interact with files complying with the FITS format, which is a data format most used in astronomy.

This package includes tools for simple manipulations of FITS files.

DS9 is an application for astronomical imaging and data visualization.

DS9 is the modern imtool used by astronomers. It is most distinguished by its support for displaying images of high dynamic range (such as 16 bit greyscale FITS files). Whereas many other tools will only read an approximation to such files, DS9 works in full precision, and uses various display parameters to map input data into 8 bit data which can be displayed on the screen.

Available parameters for the mapping include: brightness, contrast, false color, and nonlinear input mapping (such as logarithm, square root, square, etc.)

Although it may be useful in other fields, DS9 includes a fair number of features specific to astronomy. There is an astronomical "name resolver" which allows a lookup of an arbitrary named object to its coordinates. Given the coordinates of a field, online archive servers may be queried, and an image retrieved. DS9 thusly implements a preliminary "Virtual Observatory".

DS9 is entirely controllable from external programs ("XPA"), which simplifies complex tasks such as data acquisition, realtime display, and batch analysis.

If images include WCS (World Coordinate System) keywords, then they may be "blinked" to search for moving or changing objects.

SaVi allows you to simulate satellite orbits and coverage, in two and three dimensions. SaVi is particularly useful for simulating satellite constellations such as Iridium and Globalstar.

SaVi can use Geomview, an optional but useful package, for 3D rendering.

Seesat5 uses the NORAD sgp4 algorithm to compute the location of a satellite. Many different filtering methods are provided by Seesat5 so that only those satellites that might actually be viewed are presented in the report. This report includes bearing and elevation with respect to the observer's location as well as other information of interest to the observer.

Although an observer would find no use for it, the program can be made to report the location even when it is below the horizon. For radio satellites like the Oscar series knowing when it comes above the horizon is some of the interesting information this program can provide.

Find sources, such as stars and galaxies, in astronomical images. The input data files are in FITS file format, and are analyzed to compute the locations of sources, with the ability to distinguish between galaxies and stars using a neural-network technique.

The CFITSIO library consists of a set of functions for reading and writing FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files. The S-Lang CFITSIO module wraps many of the functions of the CFITSIO library and permits one to easily manipulate FITS files from the S-Lang interpreter.

An OpenGL Solar System simulator which includes the sun, the nine planets, a few major satellites, and background stars.

This package has since been rewritten and repackaged as Celestia, but since that package has significantly higher hardware requirements than ssystem does, this package is being kept around. Celestia has a better looking solar system, more options, and unlike ssystem, is actually still being worked on, so you probably only want to use this if you have older hardware that cannot run Celestia at a reasonable speed.

This package allows the installation and removal of astronomy catalogues, converting those catalogues to astronomy programs' data formats.

All stardata catalogues conforming to stardata-common policy are converted automatically at installation time to the formats of astronomy programs that support stardata-common.

The register-stardata program is transparent for the user; this program is called automatically when any astronomy package conforming to the stardata-common policy is installed, upgraded or removed.

StarPlot is a GTK+ based program that can be used interactively to view three-dimensional perspective charts of stars. Charts can be re-centered, rotated, or zoomed in or out with a mouse click (this can also, of course, be done via dialog boxes for more precision). Stars may be viewed (or ignored) by spectral class and absolute magnitude.

StarPlot is packaged with starconvert, a utility that converts line-oriented stellar data records to StarPlot format. Most star data files available on the Internet can be converted this way if a short file describing the original file format is provided to starconvert.

Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real-time. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.

Some features:

• default star catalogue with over 600 thousand stars,
• information about the brightest stars (spectral type, distance, etc.),
• downloadable star catalogue extensions, for up to 210 million stars,
• all New General Catalogue (NGC) objects,
• images of almost all Messier objects and the Milky Way,
• real time positions of the planets and their satellites,
• 13 different cultures with their constellations,
• artistic illustrations of the 88 Western constellations,
• very realistic atmosphere, sunrise and sunset,
• 7 panoramic landscapes (more can be made or downloaded from the website),
• scripting with ECMAScript,
• plug-in support: Stellarium comes with 8 plug-ins by default, including:
• artificial satellites plug-in (updated from an on-line TLE database),
• ocular simulation plug-in (shows how objects look like in a given ocular),
• Solar System editor plug-in (imports comet and asteroid data from the MPC),
• telescope control plug-in (Meade LX200 and Celestron NexStar compatible).

Stellarium should not be used for very high accurate calculation or ephemerids like eclipse predictions. However, it is the ideal program to prepare an observation evening with naked eye, binocular, or small telescope.

Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis (ORSA) is a framework for Celestial Mechanics investigations. The main goals of the project are the implementation of state of the art orbit integration algorithms, with concerns on accuracy and performance, and the development of a number of analysis tools.

This package contains xorsa, the main graphical application provided by the ORSA project. It is an interactive tool for scientific grade Celestial Mechanics computations. Asteroids, comets, artificial satellites, Solar, and extra-Solar planetary systems can be accurately reproduced, simulated and analyzed.

Xplanet renders an image of a planet into an X window or a file. All of the major planets and most satellites can be drawn, and different map projections are also supported, including azimuthal, hemisphere, Lambert, Mercator, Mollweide, Peters, polyconic, and rectangular.

In order to run xplanet, you'll need at least one map file. Some maps are included in the xplanet-images package.

Xplanet renders an image of a planet into an X window or a file.

In order to run xplanet, you'll need at least one map file. This package includes some map files that can be used with xplanet.

Cubeview is a viewer for 3D data store in FITS files, a file format extensively used among astronomers. It is specialized in displaying spectro-imaging data but can be used to do basic visualization on any FITS file containing a 3D array.

Cubeview features a stand-alone graphical user interface which adheres to the GTK+ look-and-feel. Being written (mostly) in Yorick, it is inherently scriptable. A system of hooks allows custom actions to be repeated automatically when certain events occur.

PDL gives standard perl the ability to COMPACTLY store and SPEEDILY manipulate the large N-dimensional data arrays which are the bread and butter of scientific computing. The idea is to turn perl in to a free, array-oriented, numerical language in the same sense as commercial packages like IDL and MatLab. One can write simple perl expressions to manipulate entire numerical arrays all at once. For example, using PDL the perl variable $a can hold a 1024x1024 floating point image, it only takes 4Mb of memory to store it and expressions like $a=sqrt($a)+2 would manipulate the whole image in a few seconds.

A simple interactive shell (perldl) is provided for command line use together with a module (PDL) for use in perl scripts.

ScientificPython is a collection of Python modules that are useful for scientific computing. Most modules are rather general, others belong to specific domains and will be of interest to only a small number of users (e.g. the module Scientific.IO.PDB). Almost all modules make extensive use of Numerical Python (NumPy)

CelestLab is a library of space flight dynamics functions written in Scilab. This library has been developed and is maintained by the CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales) for mission analysis purposes. The library is used by CNES for the trajectory analysis and orbit design for various type of missions. CelestLab gathers in ten modules about 200 functions that allow mission designers to perform various tasks such as: orbit propagation, attitude computation, elementary manoeuvre computation, change of reference frames, change of coordinates, three body orbit analysis. CelestLab has been validated against the CNES flight dynamics reference software. Selected examples from mission analysis typical studies are provided in the CelestLab help pages.

Thanks to this toolbox, a user can overload user-defined functions as if they were built-in functions.

This provides the capabilities to overload low-level Scilab's internal features.

This Scilab library interfaces the MySQL C library. This module allows access to all functions available in the MySQL library in order to manage databases.

sunclock is an X11 application that displays a map of the Earth and indicates the illuminated portion of the globe by drawing sunlit areas dark on light, night areas as light on dark. In addition to providing local time for the default timezone, it also displays GMT time, legal and solar time of major cities, their latitude and longitude, and the mutual distances of arbitrary locations on Earth. Sunclock can display meridians, parallels, tropics and arctic circles. It has builtin functions that accelerate the speed of time and show the evolution of seasons.

XTide 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.

XTide can work with the X window system, plain text terminals, or the web. This is accomplished with three separate programs: the interactive interface (xtide), the non-interactive or command line interface (tide), and the web interface (xttpd).

The algorithm that XTide uses to predict tides is used by the National Ocean Service in the U.S. It is significantly more accurate than the simple tide clocks that can be bought in novelty stores. However, it takes more to predict tides accurately than just a spiffy algorithm -- data are required for every tidal prediction location. This package provides a sample data set for only one location so you can try out the package, but anything useful requires the data packaged in the xtide-data package (or downloaded from the XTide ftp site).

XTide 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.

This package provides the harmonics data used by the xtide package to display tidal information for most parts of the world. The data are packaged separately from xtide because they may be updated separately.

Some data omitted from the upstream harmonics file because of restrictions on commercial distribution and were included in the non-free package xtide-data-nonfree.

Yorick is an interpreted programming language for:

• scientific simulations or calculations
• postprocessing or steering large simulation codes
• interactive scientific graphics
• reading, writing, and translating large files of numbers

The language features a compact syntax for many common array operations, so it processes large arrays of numbers very quickly and efficiently. Superficially, yorick code resembles C code, but yorick variables are never explicitly declared and have a dynamic scoping similar to many Lisp dialects. The yorick language is designed to be typed interactively at a keyboard, as well as stored in files for later use.

This package includes an emacs-based development environment, which you can launch by typing M-x yorick in emacs.

This package provides a star catalog which contains approximately 3800 star records including the known stars nearer to Earth than approximately 80 light-years, taken from the Third Catalogue of Nearby Stars (preliminary edition), Gliese and Jahreiss, 1991.

This stellar data set may be viewed with the StarPlot program available from Debian, but can also be used with other astronomical software.

This package contains both runtime and development libraries. Many routines are included in pgplot for viewing scientific data. Many (about 70) output devices are supported. 2-D , 3-D , contour, image manipulation, etc. are well supported. Interactive routines are included. Both a C and a FORTRAN library are present. See http://astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot/ for documentation.

World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and SRTM elevation data to experience Earth in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there.

These data come from the [Yale] Bright Star Catalog, 5th Rev. Ed. (preliminary), Hoffleit and Warren, 1991. It contains all the stars with apparent magnitude brighter than +6.5.

This stellar data set may be viewed with StarPlot program available from Debian, but can be used with other astronomical software.

SpaceChart is a program to display 3d maps of stars and move freely around it. It is capable of showing only a subset of the stars in a given data file, and only those within a given distance of the center of the display. Also, it shows lines between stars that are closer than a given distance.

Stars is an astronomy program that lets you view the sky from your computer.

Except for generating a small rotation matrix and some parameters, all math is integer based, allowing very fast display. At 16 bytes of memory per object, many objects can be loaded at once. Most graphics are antialiased.

Xephem is an interactive astronomical ephemeris program for X Windows systems with Motif. It provides many graphical views as well as quantitative heliocentric, geocentric and topocentric information for Earth satellites, solar system and celestial objects.

This project used to be an official Debian package in 2002 but vanished from the Debian pool of packaged software (for reasons that should be clarified). The URL of the "unofficial" package points to the location where the old package could be found on http://snapshot.debian.net.

There are later upstream versions than this Debian package available.

LinOccult uses the DE405 precomputed major planets ephemeris (position of astronomical object in the sky at a given time) that are provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for a precise numerical integration of asteroidal orbits. The user can select asteroids to process by changing several parameters in a configuration file.

Some initial packaging has been performed and will be submitted to pkg-scicomp.alioth.debian.org.

The ESO-MIDAS system provides general tools for image processing and data reduction with emphasis on astronomical applications including imaging and special reduction packages for ESO instrumentation at La Silla and the VLT at Paranal. In addition it contains applications packages for stellar and surface photometry, image sharpening and decomposition, statistics and various others.

The official name, ESO-MIDAS, is a registered trademark. ESO-MIDAS is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and can be implemented on OpenVMS and UNIX (Linux) systems.

OrbFit is a software system allowing one to compute the orbits of asteroids (soon also comets) starting from the observations, to propagate these orbits, and to compute predictions on the future (and past) position on the celestial sphere. It is a tool to be used to find a well known asteroid, to recover a lost one, to attribute a small group of observations, to identify two orbits with each other, to study the future (and/or past) close approaches to Earth, thus to assess the risk of an impact, and more.

OrbFit has been developed by a team of professional scientists, working in the field of asteroid and comet dynamics, orbit determination, nonlinear and chaotic dynamics, and astrometry. The composition of the OrbFit consortium, and the motivations for this work, are described below.

Status of packaging:

A rudimentary package was prepared, upstream was contacted with a very positive reply. The packaging bits will be injected to pkg-scicomp in near future.