NullProg's Journal: Everyday Linux

I'm ignoring my previous journal entry from 2004 in which I said '04 was the year of Linux (Yeah I was wrong. Lots of programmers obviously don't equate to new users).

Now I'm going to use my /. journal to inform people about everyday computer topics and issues that came up for me and how I used Linux to address them.

Astronomy, Comet 17P Holmes.

My 13 year old son comes home yesterday and states a comet is exploding. Not hearing about it on slashdot, today I look it up on space.com. 17P Holmes exploded last month and the vapor is now visible to the naked eye. It's supposed to be in the Perseus constellation.

Under OS/2, Windows, and DOS I used ezCosmos to see where the stars where. With my old SuSE Linux install, I used Xephem. The Ubuntu repositories didn't list Xephem so I downloaded and installed Stellarium. Excellent program but it doesn't show 17P/Holmes. I download KStars and it displays 17P/Holmes within Perseus.

This next weekend I'll use my 900mm telescope to look at Holmes. Tonight the kids and wife viewed it with our binoculars. Pretty cool.

kStars is a bit too much to run on my PIII laptop. I'll give an update later on how Xephem works under XUbuntu.

Enjoy,
nullprog.