Category/Science/astronomy

Broaden your selection: Category/Science

Category/Science

Astro Catalog: The Astro::Catalog module is an generic, object-oriented astronomical catalogue. It provides access to the online USNO-A2 and Guide Star Catalogues provided by ESO/ST-ECF, and additionally provides read/write access to ARK CLUSTER format files.

Astroconst: Astroconst makes header files in C, Fortran, Perl, IDL, Java, and GNUplot defining many astrophysical constants useful for scientific programming. A single modifiable data file automatically generates these header files, so you can add new constants to the data file and generate new header files in all appropriate languages without fiddling with each header file individually.

Avsomat: 'avsomat' is a framework for automating the scheduling of variable star observations, identification and photometry of variable stars on CCD images, and the reporting, management, and verification of results. It uses electronic charts of the star fields in which variable stars appear, and maintains a view of the current results in the form of a collection of interlinked Web pages.

Botec: BOTEC is a simple astrophysical and orbital mechanics calculator, including a database of all named Solar System objects. BOTEC is intended as a simple but useful calculator to assist with making astrophysical, orbital mechanics, and space navigation calculations. As the origin of the acronym applies, BOTEC is more of a "back-of-the-envelope calculator" rather than an industrial-strength calculator, although this may change in the future.

Celestia: Celestia is a real-time visual simulation of space. Choose a point within the Local Group of galaxies, and Celestia will show you an approximation of how it would appear to your eyes were you actually there. Some of what Celestia shows is necessarily hypothetical--the farther away from Earth you get, the less real data there is and the more guesswork is involved. Thus Celestia supplements observational data with good guesses based on models of stellar and planetary processes. You can also navigate at an immense range of scales. Orbit a couple kilometers above the surface of a tiny, irregular asteroid, then head off toward Jupiter, watching it grow from a bright point of light into a looming sphere filling your field of vision. Leave our solar system entirely and observe the sun as it fades from a brilliant disk to a bright star, disappearing almost entirely as you head off toward the Upsilon Andromeda system to orbit around its innermost giant planet.

EPICS: 'EPICS' is a software infrastructure for building distributed control systems to operate devices such as particle accelerators, large experiments and major telescopes. These systems comprise tens or hundreds of computers, networked together so they can communicate and provide control and feedback of the various parts from a control room, or remotely over the Internet. EPICS uses Client/Server and Publish/Subscribe techniques to communicate between the various computers. Most servers (called Input/Output Controllers or IOCs) perform real-world I/O and local control tasks, and publish this information to clients using the Channel Access (CA) network protocol. CA is specially designed for the kind of high bandwidth, soft real-time networking applications that EPICS is used for, and is one reason why it can be used to build a control system comprising hundreds of computers.

Ephemeris: 'Ephemeris' reads, writes, and interpolates the JPL planetary ephemeris data that is the world standard planetary dataset. It should compile on any machine that uses gcc and supports IEEE floating point arithmetic, and has been tested under GNU/Linux. It uses an included library, gnulliver.c, that automatically handles integer and floating point Big-endian/Little-endian byte swapping to match Big-endian/network order on any computer. gnulliver.c can be used separately under the LGPL 2.1. This is a redesign of JPL's original FORTRAN code, available on JPL's FTP website (ftp://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/eph/export/), with some added flexibility (including patching some inconsistencies in the original JPL data files). 'Ephemeris' is not associated with JPL or NASA, but just uses JPL's data.

Galaxy- Stellar Simulation: Galaxy is a computer program which simulates the motion of stars under the influence of gravity. Create a field of random stars to begin with, then watch the stars move as they are accelerated by their mutual gravitational attractions. You can vary the number of stars and the strength of gravity. Watch how the attractive forces accelerate individual stars and send them careening in new directions. Watch how large groups of stars develop into interesting patterns over time, such as clusters and spiral arms.

Gcx: 'GCX' provides a complete set of data-reduction functions for CCD photometry, with frame WCS fitting, automatic target identification, aperture photometry of target and standard stars, single-frame ensemble photometry data reduction, multi-frame color coefficient fitting, extinction coefficient fitting, and all-sky photometry. 'gcx' also controls CCD cameras and telescopes and implements automatic observation scripting. It controls cameras through a hardware-specific server that it connects to through a TCP socket. It controls telescopes which use the LX200 protocol, and refines pointing by matching images to the GSC catalog position of stars. It also generates FITS files with comprehensive header information.

Global Village: Global Village is a Gnome application designed to place a front-end, or graphical user interface onto the CLI interface of Xplanet. Originally intended to create and update the desktop wallpaper in a gnome environment, showing a traditional rectangular projection of the planet Earth. Global Village now provides as many of the features of Xplanet as seem reasonable, and with the ability for plugins the scope is nearly limitless.

… further results