Asterope

Asterope is an effort to develop an open-source feature-rich application for amateur astronomers. When finished it will provide sky charts, observation planning, telescope control, basic image processing and ephemeris.

Asterope is developed as a companion to 16” inch telescope. By complexity it is somewhere between popular educational toys (Stellarium, WW Telescope) and professional tools (Aladin, Topcat). It is right choice if you need finder chart for 13th magnitude planetary nebula, or recent position of a not-yet-named asteroid.

It is work in progress. Major stable release is expected around 2016. First milestone is Galway Sky Atlas, large freely-printable 500 sky charts. It should prove that computer generated sky atlas can be as good as hand-optimized atlas.

You may follow Asterope and get current source code at Github.

M45

Why

There are already dozens of astronomical apps so why building just another? For two reasons:

First none of the existing applications provides stuff I would like to have. For example: high quality printable finder charts, double star orbit visualizations or voice controlled telescope. Computers enable great things, but astronomical software seems to be stacked in 1990ties

Second reason is community. There is no project anyone could just fork on Github and hack interesting feature over single evening. Asterope is easy for new comers to pick-up. It is written in simple language (Java & Kotlin) with great IDE support. It also comes with unit tests, readable code, and good documentation.

Other apps

There are many other open-source astronomical applications and Asterope ‘borrows’ from them heavily. But this project also gives back: Our goal is to ‘cannibalize’ various small apps and libraries into single integrated package. It is done by refactoring, adding unit tests and sometimes complete rewrite.

Current targets for ‘assimilation’ are:

Some code developed for Asterope was already released in separate projects: