Cartes Du Ciel
Sky Map now available for Linux. There is even a .deb package!
Patrick Chevalley wrote the Cartes Du Ciel star chart software for Windows some years ago and I missed this useful software when I went over to Mac OS X. Now there is a Linux build available in binary as a .deb and an .rpm package. The source code is, of course, available but Patrick uses the Lazarus Pascal compiler so building the program from source may be problematic!
- Home page for the Version 3 Sky Chart software
- SourceForge page to download the program binary and extra catalogues
- libgdk-pixbuf2 description in the Ubuntu Dapper repository
Installation on Xubuntu with OpenOffice and Inkscape installed along with the multimedia libraries went as follows
- Universe repositories must be available in your sources.list file
- Download the .deb file from the SourceForge download page
- Install (sudo aptitude install libgdk-pixbuf2) the libgdk-pixbuf2 library first
- Then install the .deb package using the command line
sudo dpkg --install skychart_3.0.1.2-1_i386.deb
You can also download extra star catalogues from the SourceForge page as ZIP files, just
- Unzip each catalogue (you can use Archive Manager or a command line command)
- You will find a folder with the data files and a text file
- Move or copy both the folder and the text file to /usr/share/apps/skychart/cat
- The catalogue will appear in the Setup | Catalog | Stars dialog box in the SkyChart program.
This version is a beta release; I had a few ‘divide by zero’ errors when scrolling, centring and zooming objects through large factors. Apart from that the program feels solid and responds quickly. Image export is limited to JPG but I can print to PDF from the File | Print option using other software.
Some other astronomical resources include…
- Stellarium (version 0.71 is in the Dapper repository). This program is heavy on processor and video hardware but looks stunning.
- PDF star charts in colour and monochrome. Down to Mag 7, 20 sheets cover the whole sky.
- PP3 - the software and catalogues used with TeX to generate the star charts above
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bodmas.org, 6 January 2007