Archive:SIGs/Astronomy/Spin

File:SIGs Astronomy astronomy4.png

Fedora Astronomy Live media

Summary

The goal is to create a Live media spin containing a set of tools for astronomers and astrophysicists. Released as part of International Year of Astronomy effort.

Owner

• Name: MarekMahut, SergioPascual, LubomirRintel

Interested people

• Astronomy SIG

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 11
• Last updated: 26th Mar 2009
• Percentage of completion: 95%

Detailed Description

Manage to review and include a set of essential and non-essential tools for astronomers in Fedora and provide a Live media containing these tools. The idea is to make it possible for a person to unpack his telescope, boot the CD/USB stick on his notebook and just enjoy the sky.

Benefit to Fedora

At the moment, there is no such distribution which offers a set of professional open-source tools for astronomers and astrophysicists and Fedora is very popular in astronomers' environment (that it is strongly linux-based). Best benefit would be enlargement of our community not only to astronomers, but potentially to universities and other scientific environments.

Scope

Requires to review open source market for such tools, introduce selected packages in Fedora and with the release 11 of Fedora provide a spin with these packages.

Plan

• Include packages in Fedora (status: done)
• Build a list of candidate softwares (status: Features/FedoraAstronomy/Packages)
• Review these candidates and select potential software (status: done)
• Package properly selected software (status: done)
• Build a Live CD/usb stick with these packages (status: done)
• Select from build packages those which will be included in the media (status: done)
• Build the final kick start (status: in progress)
• Distribute (status: pending)

Test Plan

• Package has been tested as part of Fedora release schedule.

User Experience

• Powerful completely open-source and free tool for amateurs and professionals.

Dependencies

• The list of candidates packages is the first step to build. It will be presented in this section.

Contingency Plan

• This feature would not affect Fedora in any critical way. Packages will be reviewed and tested separately and the spin also.

Documentation

• Documentation is usually provided separately with each software. Brief description of each package will be described in this section.

FAQ

• Answer to question will be bring with time. Feel free to put here any question regarding this feature.

Comments

• Here a set of astronomy apps on Linux which might be interesting: KStars , Xephem , Celestia , Stellarium , Partiview . -- RolandWolters
  • Xephem is not GPL-compatible software, KStarts, Stellarium and Celestia are in Fedora and we are working on Partiview... -- MarekMahut

• I want iraf... -- MamoruTasaka
  • Unfortunately it has licensing issues :( -- MarekMahut