sternons

(Gothic staírnons = stars)

Purpose

This is intended to be a collection of loosely related amateur astronomers tools, interconnected not necessarily with nice GUIs, but foremost by task related documentation that enables the user to use the tools to her/his own liking.

The tools are intended to ease amateur observation preparations such as printing out relevant star maps, but they also presume a basic text interface knowledge.

Licensing

The code herein are covered by GNU LGPL for maximal volunteer/commercial collaboration potential. One exception to this is generated sample code (postscript, PDF, pgplSQL, etc.) and data (database data, SVG etc.), which are derived from publicly available star catalogues (such as those from CDS catalogue service Strasbourg), and therefore should be public domain, according to golden rule ethics. The attached documentation will explicitly list each file, and whether it is to be sorted under GNU LGPL or whether it is public domain by their respective nature.

Coding philosophy

Unix philosophy: a set of small well-designed tools interacting through text interfaces, with which to collate a larger, more general tool.

For now, there is no philosophy on preferred programming language(s), and whether such a preference is needed. The coding intention is towards making the tool set fairly operating system independent, so selection of GUI:s is geared towards portability. Java is very popular according to portability measures, but isn't suitable for fast data generators such as planet orbit computations. Java might be topical when making integrating tool callers and GUI:s. OpenGL might be topical for graphical 3D browsers.

Development

The development philosophy is directed towards keeping the loosely knit tool-kit design of the tool kit, while integration GUI:s and integration scripts are welcome as well. This is in order to make at least some tools compileable and usable in as many operating environments as possible.

Participation

The organization for collaboration is not yet explored, so for now, please wait some time until the full potential of google code is explored, and how it may interact with some other fora for the purpose, f.ex. the Nordic Astronomiguiden (Swedish speaking, sorry!). If you are of the impatient kind, please prefer mailing TOMAS DÖT KINDAHL ŚNÄBELBÜLLE COMHEM POÏNT SE (replacing DÖT and POÏNT with '.' and ŚNÄBELBÜLLE with '@') instead of tomki923 ŚNÄBELBÜLLE gmail ŚTÖP com which is seldomly used.

Link to the sternons blog. Just started August 3, 16:22.