KStars is a free and open-source planetarium program built using the KDE Frameworks. It is available for Linux, BSD, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. A light version of KStars is available for Android devices. It provides an accurate graphical representation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes up to 100 million stars, 13,000 deep sky objects, constellations from different cultures, all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets, asteroids, satellites, and supernovae. It has features to appeal to users of all levels, from informative hypertext articles about astronomy, to robust control of telescopes and CCD cameras, and logging of observations of specific objects.
The Lunar Orbiter program was a series of five uncrewed lunar orbiter missions launched by the United States from 1966 through 1967. Intended to help select Apollo landing sites by mapping the Moon's surface, they provided the first photographs from lunar orbit and photographed both the Moon and Earth.
Astrophotography, also known as astronomical imaging, is the photography or imaging of astronomical objects, celestial events, or areas of the night sky. The first photograph of an astronomical object was taken in 1840, but it was not until the late 19th century that advances in technology allowed for detailed stellar photography. Besides being able to record the details of extended objects such as the Moon, Sun, and planets, modern astrophotography has the ability to image objects outside of the visible spectrum of the human eye such as dim stars, nebulae, and galaxies. This is accomplished through long time exposure as both film and digital cameras can accumulate and sum photons over long periods of time or using specialized optical filters which limit the photons to a certain wavelength.
Speckle imaging comprises a range of high-resolution astronomical imaging techniques based on the analysis of large numbers of short exposures that freeze the variation of atmospheric turbulence. They can be divided into the shift-and-add method and the speckle interferometry methods. These techniques can dramatically increase the resolution of ground-based telescopes, but are limited to bright targets.
Slax is a LiveCD Linux distribution developed by Tomáš Matějíček and based on upstream customizable Linux distributions. Packages can be added by apt package manager or can be prepared as modules. The tagline for Slax refers to itself as "your pocket operating system".
Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in multiple editions: Desktop, Server, and Core for Internet of things devices and robots. The operating system is developed by the British company Canonical, and a community of other developers, under a meritocratic governance model. As of October 2023, the most-recent release is 23.10, and the current long-term support release is 22.04.
Video astronomy(aka - Camera Assisted Astronomy, aka electronically-assisted astronomy or "EAA") is a branch of astronomy for near real-time observing of relatively faint astronomical objects using very sensitive CCD or CMOS cameras. Unlike lucky imaging, video astronomy does not discard unwanted frames, and image corrections such as dark subtraction are often not applied, however, the gathered data may be retained and processed in more traditional ways.. Although the field has a long history reaching back to 1928 with the inception of live television broadcasting of the planet Mars, it has largely been developed more recently by amateur enthusiasts and is characterized by the use of relatively inexpensive equipment, such as easily available sensitive security cameras, in contrast to the equipment used for advanced astrophotography.
AppImage is an open-source format for distributing portable software on Linux. It aims to allow the installation of binary software independently of specific Linux distributions, a concept often referred to as upstream packaging. As a result, one AppImage can be installed and run across Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux without needing to use different files. It aims to be a format that's self-contained, rootless, and independent of the underlying Linux distribution.
ImageJ is a Java-based image processing program developed at the National Institutes of Health and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation. Its first version, ImageJ 1.x, is developed in the public domain, while ImageJ2 and the related projects SciJava, ImgLib2, and SCIFIO are licensed with a permissive BSD-2 license. ImageJ was designed with an open architecture that provides extensibility via Java plugins and recordable macros. Custom acquisition, analysis and processing plugins can be developed using ImageJ's built-in editor and a Java compiler. User-written plugins make it possible to solve many image processing and analysis problems, from three-dimensional live-cell imaging to radiological image processing, multiple imaging system data comparisons to automated hematology systems. ImageJ's plugin architecture and built-in development environment has made it a popular platform for teaching image processing.
Martin P. Mobberley is a British amateur astronomer, author, and former electronics engineer.
Drizzle is a digital image processing method for the linear reconstruction of undersampled images. The method is normally used for the combination of astronomical images and was originally developed for the Hubble Deep Field observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope. The algorithm, known as variable-pixel linear reconstruction, or informally as "Drizzle", preserves photometry and resolution, can weight input images according to the statistical significance of each pixel, and removes the effects of geometric distortion on both image shape and photometry. In addition, it is possible to use drizzling to combine dithered images in the presence of cosmic rays.
Astronomy Now is a monthly British magazine on astronomy and space. According to the Royal Astronomical Society, Astronomy Now is the "principal amateur astronomy magazine in Britain" with a reputed circulation of 24,000.
Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution designed to be small, simple, and secure. It uses musl, BusyBox, and OpenRC instead of the more commonly used glibc, GNU Core Utilities, and systemd. This makes Alpine one of few Linux distributions not to be based on the GNU Core Utilities.
In lunar photography, the Looney 11 rule is a method of estimating correct exposures without a light meter. For daylight photography, there is a similar rule called the Sunny 16 rule. The basic rule is: "For astronomical photos of the Moon's surface, set aperture to f/11 and shutter speed to the [reciprocal of the] ISO film speed [or ISO setting]."
Thierry Legault is a French amateur astronomer, specializing in astrophotography.
Guetzli is a freely licensed JPEG encoder that Jyrki Alakuijala, Robert Obryk, and Zoltán Szabadka have developed in Google's Zürich research branch. The encoder seeks to produce significantly smaller files than prior encoders at equivalent quality, albeit at very low speed. It is named after the Swiss German diminutive expression for biscuits, in line with the names of other compression technology from Google.
Siril is a software application for astrophotography, which allows pre-processing and processing of images from any type of camera. The images must be converted to 32-bit FITS format which is the format used natively by Siril. It is also possible to use the SER format, generally used during "fast" planetary or deep sky acquisitions, without prior conversion.
CBL-Mariner is a free and open-source Linux distribution that Microsoft has developed. It is the base container OS for Microsoft Azure services and the graphical component of WSL 2.
Nobara Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Thomas Crider, otherwise more colloquially referred to as "Glorious Eggroll", who is well known for developing Proton-GE. Nobara is based on Fedora Linux, developed by the Fedora Project. Nobara Linux practices free and open-source licensing techniques.
