Coords is a software-based planetarium program designed to help users explore and study the positions and movements of celestial objects. It provides an interactive and user-friendly interface to observe and learn about various astronomical phenomena.
Coords is an advanced planetarium program that is still under construction. However, it does an excellent job of displaying the sky with stars and planets accurately positioned. This version showcases celestial objects from the Yale BSC and NGC2000 catalogs, planets from Mercury to Pluto, the Sun, and the Moon. The program's GUI components have been written using GLib 2.12, GTK 2.8, Pango 1.14, and Cairo 1.4 (Debian Lenny libraries).
To use this program, simply launch the GUI component. Once launched, you can click on the sky map to move it around using the arrow keys. The map is a stereographic projection of the sky sphere, and the up and down keys change the pitch, while the left and right keys enable you to roll around the zenith. There are also spin buttons to use. Additionally, you can adjust the zoom factor using a spin button and toggle the visibility of various elements such as equator, frames, grids, star names, among others using a menu.
The Coordserver component takes no argument and serves data in two modes. The first mode is the Right Ascent-Declination pair, given as two floating point numbers separated by a comma and meant for machine processing (option -c of coordclient). The second mode is the text mode.
The Coordclient component can take up to three arguments. Firstly, the -c option should be specified (as explained above). The next argument could be a star name, which can be provided in several formats such as name, HR (Harvard Revised Catalog) number with 0-padding before the number if less than 4 digits, Bayer name (Alp Boo, Alp 1 Cen, Gam Per...), or Flamsteed name (1 Peg, with two blank spaces before the "1" because the number field is 3 characters long). The third argument, which is optional, specifies the date in YYYY-MM-DD.DDDD format. If absent, the machine's current date will be used.
Overall, Coords is a potent planetarium program that is still evolving but is impressive in its current state.
To use this program, simply launch the GUI component. Once launched, you can click on the sky map to move it around using the arrow keys. The map is a stereographic projection of the sky sphere, and the up and down keys change the pitch, while the left and right keys enable you to roll around the zenith. There are also spin buttons to use. Additionally, you can adjust the zoom factor using a spin button and toggle the visibility of various elements such as equator, frames, grids, star names, among others using a menu.
The Coordserver component takes no argument and serves data in two modes. The first mode is the Right Ascent-Declination pair, given as two floating point numbers separated by a comma and meant for machine processing (option -c of coordclient). The second mode is the text mode.
The Coordclient component can take up to three arguments. Firstly, the -c option should be specified (as explained above). The next argument could be a star name, which can be provided in several formats such as name, HR (Harvard Revised Catalog) number with 0-padding before the number if less than 4 digits, Bayer name (Alp Boo, Alp 1 Cen, Gam Per...), or Flamsteed name (1 Peg, with two blank spaces before the "1" because the number field is 3 characters long). The third argument, which is optional, specifies the date in YYYY-MM-DD.DDDD format. If absent, the machine's current date will be used.
Overall, Coords is a potent planetarium program that is still evolving but is impressive in its current state.
What's New
Version 0.11: N/A