[9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[Glenn Becker <burningc@sdf.lonestar.org>]

Greetings all -

Today I revisited Plan 9 after a long break (changed jobs, moved, etc) and
made some real progress. I'd been contemplating writing in about how slow
I found the system and my seeming inability to get networked, but I
decided instead to research the mailing list archives and got some of my
answers ...

... but. I confess that one of the things that drew me to Plan 9 was the
obvious inclusion, in the screenshot on the web page, of an astronomy
program. My thought must have been something along the lines of "an OS
that includes an astronomy program by default is an OS I want to know more
about."

Therefore one of the first things I did when I managd to get the system
installed was fire up scat. I found it an interesting program (its name is
another matter ...) but ran into problems attempting to follow some of the
examples in the man page for the program. In short, a key database of
astro-objects, the NGC catalogue, appeared to be MIA.

Sample output:

ngc1300
scat: NGC database not available

(if I followed this with a command to look at another object with an NGC
number, the program would "suicide").

Today, since I got things to run at acceptable speeds, I decided to look
into this further. If I'm not mistaken, the problem is that the file

/lib/sky/ncg2000.scat

has nothing in it, e.g. is of zero size.

Is there somewhere I can get a file that actually has data in it? Were
there licensing problems? Would love to know more about this.

Thanks,

Glenn

+-----------------------------------------------------+
Glenn Becker - burningc@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
+-----------------------------------------------------+