StarPlot: A 3-Dimensional Star Chart Viewer

Jump down to: Features | Requirements | Known Bugs | To Do


Personal note: I have lost my wedding ring at the beach in Pineto, Italy, on 7/7/2007; please see this for more information. Posting it here in the hopes that if anyone finds it, Google can direct them to this page. Sorry for the inconvenience.


StarPlot is a program for UNIX-like operating systems (such as GNU/Linux, the BSDs, and Mac OS X) that allows you to view charts of the relative 3-dimensional positions of stars in space. It is free software; the source code and documentation are available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later, at your option. Here is a screenshot (click for a larger image).

[StarPlot screenshot]

Features

The documentation is not yet complete, but most program features should be fairly self-explanatory to people familiar with stellar astronomy. (For those who aren't, the existing documentation does include a stellar astronomy crash course.) Hints: to navigate, left-click on a star; for information, right-click on a star or press <Control>D. The existing documentation is now online.

Requirements and Porting

The latest version of StarPlot is 0.95.5; it is based on the GTK+ graphics library, version 2.x. You will need that and a recent C++ compiler, preferably g++ 2.95.x or higher, to compile the program. (If you only have GTK+ 1.2, you can still compile StarPlot version 0.93.1.) In theory StarPlot should compile on any Unix platform with GTK+ 2 and g++ installed. As of version 0.94 StarPlot has an autoconf-generated configure script; this should make compilation straightforward via the usual procedure:

./configure && make && sudo make install

If you are porting StarPlot to other graphics libraries like Qt or Windows: You should not have to change the files in the classes or convert directories much, unless you are adding new features, but you will need to port all the code in the gui directory. I suggest writing a class derived from classes/viewer.h, analogous to gui/gtkviewer.h.

Known Bugs

If you find additional bugs, please let me know! If submitting patches, please do so against the latest available (pre)release, or against the Subversion repository if you are able to access it.

To Do Items

Planned for next minor release 0.96

Some ideas for the far future

... but could be sooner if you submit a patch for one of them!

Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Kevin B. McCarty.

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