What is Nova ?
Nova is a free integrated observational environment for amateur
astronomers.
It's aim is to combine ephemeris, sky view, observatory control and
basic image
capture functionality into an easy to use Gnome application.
Planned
major features include :-
- Virtual view of night sky (using
different projections).
- Ephemeris calculation and plotting.
- Remote observatory control.
- CCD image capture.
- Automatic scheduling of observational
activity.
- Astro data source independence.
Nova is still very much work in progress and for simplicity is divided
into 3 seperate subprojects.
Project
|
Description
|
Version
|
| Nova |
The
Nova application. |
cvs
(module nova)
|
| libnova |
Double
precision celestial mechanics, astrometry and astrodynamics library. |
0.11.0
|
| libncat |
Astronomical
object database. |
0.1.0
|
libnova and libncat are both C libraries
released under the GNU LGPL and can be freely used in other projects.
Screenshots
Screenshots are available here,
most recent at the top.
Download
Nova is currently only available from cvs and depends
on Gtk 2.7,
libnova and libncat. There will be a 0.5
release around September time, after Gtk 2.8 is released. Note: Gtk 2.7
is a development release, so if your not comfortable with this, please
wait for the Nova release.
Planned features for 0.5 release:-
- Flat sky view
- Sky grid
- Constellation lines
- Planets, Sun, Moon.
- Load and save sky views
- Change sky view parameters
- Automatic astro catalog download.
Licence
Nova is free software and
released under the GNU GPL license.
|
