coords 0.5.2

coords is a planetarium program. The project is still under construction, but it does a good job of showing the sky with stars and planets at the correct positions.

This version shows celestial objects from the Yale BSC and NGC2000 catalogs, planets from Mercury to Pluto, the Sun and the Moon.

All GUI parts have been written with GLib 2.12, GTK 2.8, Pango 1.14, and Cairo 1.4 (Debian Lenny libraries).

How to use it:

The GUI program:

- If you click in the sky map, you can move it with the arrow keys. Its a stereographic projection of the sky sphere, the up and down keys change the pitch and the left and right keys allow you to roll around the zenith. There are spin buttons too. Finally, the sky can also be moved by dragging the mouse on it.
- A spin button adjusts the zoom factor (Scale).
- A menu allows you to toggle the visibility of various things (equator, frames or grids, star names, ...)
- other stuff, i hope its intuitive

coordserver takes no argument. Currently, it can serve data in two modes. The first is a Right Ascent,Declination pair, given as two floating point numbers separated by a comma (option -c of coordclient). This is meant for machine
processing. The second mode is text.

coordclient can take up to 3 arguments. The first is the -c option (see above).

The next argument is the star name, which can be :

- a name
- an HR (Harvard Revised Catalog) number with 0 padding before the number if less than 4 digits
- a Bayer name (Alp Boo, Alp 1 Cen, Gam Per...)
- a Flamsteed name ( 1 Peg, with two blank spaces before the "1" because the number field is 3 characters long).

The next argument can be date in YYYY-MM-DD.DDDD format. If absent, the machine current date will be used.