Distro Astro - Linux for astronomers

Διανομή Linux με πολλά χρήσιμα εργαλεία για παρατηρητές/αστροφωτογράφους.

http://www.distroastro.org/

Distro Astro has features for most astronomy tasks—from running observatories and planetariums, to conducting professional research, to amateur astronomy, outreach, and astrophotography. There is something for anyone doing astronomy.

Observatories

 

The INDI Library built into Distro Astro provides telescope control for common telescopes from Meade, Celestron, Orion, and other major telescope brands. It also provides observatory dome control for commercial domes such as Sirius Observatories, and support for devices like focusers, filter wheels, and cloud sensors.

 

It includes support for a large set of imagers from SBIG, Apogee, FLI, and Starlight Xpress, and common amateur astronomy webcams like the Philips ToUCam, Meade DSI and LPI, and Celestron NexImage. See the full list of hardware support.

 

Access to the INDI library is provided by supported clients such as KStars, Cartes du Ciel, and XEphem, all of which are built into the distribution.

Planetariums

 

Nightshade Legacy is an advanced planetarium software for fish-eye dome projections developed by planetarium provider Digitalis Education. It was initially a fork of popular software Stellarium and tailored for planetarium use. Nightshade and Stellarium are both included.

 

Celestia and OpenUniverse can also be run in a planetarium without fish-eye projection, allowing viewers to explore the solar system and beyond. Future versions may include Mitaka, a 3D planetarium developed at NAOJ.

Astrophotography

 

Distro Astro includes tools for astrophotography. The combination of KStars, Ekos, INDI, and Astrometry.net provides autoguiding, autofocus, polar alignment correction, plate solving, dithering, and video capture with filter wheel support. Capture software wxAstroCapture was written specifically with astronomy in mind. Image tools such as Registax, Iris, and GCX let you stack and process the image. Additional tools like iMerge, Gimp, and ImageMagick are included for post-processing.

Celestial Mapping

 

PP3 is a professional mapping software that produces high quality sky maps such as those shown in magazines. It produces maps in TeX format. It uses TeX Live and Ghostscript to convert the PP3 output into common formats such as PDF.

Data Analysis

 

Data analysis tools are included in Distro Astro. It has IRAF, XImtool, and SAOImage DS9 for reduction and analysis of astronomical data. It is compatible with other researcher's tools such as AIPS, AIPS++, CASA, CIAO, IDL, or GDL although these are not included by default.

 

For Python users, AstroPy, NumPy, PyFITS, PyWCS, VOTable, NOVAS and astrolib.coords are installed by default. The repositories contain additional libraries such SciPy, CosmoloPy, APLPy, PyEphem, and NASA's OSCAAR which can be installed via apt-get.

 

It also has GFortran which can run a lot of legacy Fortran code in astronomy. If needed, other Fortran compilers like G95 and Fort77 are in the repositories.

Education

 

Distro Astro contains software useful for classroom use. It includes desktop planetarium software such as Stellarium and Cartes du Ciel for simulating the position of the stars and planets in the sky, with built-in databases of celestial objects that let you find information about any object in the catalogs.

 

It includes software to calculate and predict astronomical events, such as XEphem, Astronomy Lab 2, AstroCC Coordinate Converter, and command line tools ephem and aa. It also includes Meteoracle for meteor showers, GPredict for artificial satellites, XTide for the tides, and Accurate Times for Islamic calendar calculations.

 

Gravitational simulators like Planets and Gravity allow you to play with masses, velocities, and orbits. Another program called Gravit is compatible but not included.

 

Programs like Where is M13? and StarPlot Viewer allow you to visualize the positions of stars and galaxies in 3-D space. Virtual Moon Atlas lets you study the surface of the moon using textures and overlays. OpenRocket lets you design model rockets.

 

The Digital Universe Atlas developed by the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History is compatible with Distro Astro but not included. Many other educational tools on astronomy and space science that are compatible with Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty LTS will also run on Distro Astro.

Time and Location

 

Having your correct time and location is important in astronomical work. Distro Astro uses the geolocation service GeoIP to know your location, and ensures that your installed astronomy applications are set to the correct latitude and longitude so they will work correctly.

 

Distro Astro has the NTP service installed and enabled by default. As soon as you are connected to the Internet, your computer's time is automatically set to a network time server to ensure that your applications always use the correct Standard Time.

Astronomy Theme

 

The look and feel of a computer is just as important as the functionality, and Distro Astro uses an astronomy-inspired theme for everything from the boot loader, boot splash screen, login screen, wallpapers, screensavers, and shutdown screen.

 

The default wallpaper is a slide show of Hubble images that change every hour, and you can change it to an Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) wallpaper that changes everyday using the latest image from apod.nasa.gov.

 

A unique feature of Distro Astro is support for Nightvision Mode. This allows you to toggle between normal and red nightvision colors to preserve dark adaptation when using the computer at night, especially during observations.

 

To add fun to the command line, Distro Astro displays a random astronomy quote each time you open a terminal, similar to the ones you find at the bottom of this page.

 

All of these features combine to create an astronomy-focused user experience when you are at your computer day and night.