[9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[Glenn Becker]

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
+-----------------------------------------------------+

Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[john]

> 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
> +-----------------------------------------------------+

>From the scat man page:
The Digitized Sky Survey, 102 CD-ROMs, is not distributed with the
system.

I had always assumed that was the reason. A 103-CD Plan 9 distro
is not something I would enjoy.

John

Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[Glenn Becker]

> The Digitized Sky Survey, 102 CD-ROMs, is not distributed with the
> system.
>
> I had always assumed that was the reason. A 103-CD Plan 9 distro
> is not something I would enjoy.

well, ngc2000 != DSS, at least as far as I know.

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

Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[geoff]

Read all of scat(7)'s SEE ALSO.

Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[a]

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You're correct. ngc2000 has been made freely available for non-
commercial use; google ngc2000.dat.gz. I last looked at this some
months ago; I think I had to modify scat to not automatically try
to mount the DSS from juke. I've since lost the change (but it
should likely be redone and submitted).

DSS is also freely available a plate at a time in various places. I
briefly considered trying to work up something for dynamic
download, but lost interest (I was only on scat on a tangetn,
trying to get the 2e roads program working).

[-- Attachment #2: Type: message/rfc822, Size: 2467 bytes --]

From: Glenn Becker <burningc@sdf.lonestar.org>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
Subject: Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:39:01 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0804132337390.4972@sdf.lonestar.org>


> The Digitized Sky Survey, 102 CD-ROMs, is not distributed with the
> system.
>
> I had always assumed that was the reason. A 103-CD Plan 9 distro
> is not something I would enjoy.

well, ngc2000 != DSS, at least as far as I know.

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

Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[Glenn Becker]

> Read all of scat(7)'s SEE ALSO.

OK. So I have tracked down the NGC 2000.0 catalogue:

ftp://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/adc/archives/catalogs/7/7118/

I am not sure yet whether there is anything special I need to do to
ngc2000.dat.gz to make it available for scat to use ...

Apologies if these are dopey musings ... am still very much exploring.

Thanks,

Glenn

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

Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[Rob Pike]

You'll need to process it from the textual form it's in now to the
binary format used by scat.
It's also probably not quite the same data set scat used since the
provenance is different,
but it's likely to be fine.

Someone at the labs may be able to root around in my directory there
and find the
program that does the conversion.  Or maybe I'll make it a project for myself.

It's very easy to figure out the format; the function loadngc() in
scat.c is trivial.

-rob

Re: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters

[Glenn Becker]

>> The Digitized Sky Survey, 102 CD-ROMs, is not distributed with the
>> system.
>>
>> I had always assumed that was the reason. A 103-CD Plan 9 distro
>> is not something I would enjoy.
>
> well, ngc2000 != DSS, at least as far as I know.

in re the DSS, would it be possible to have the program query

http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form

or

http://archive.eso.org/dss/dss

rather than assume the presence of a 102 CD set somewhere?

... the coding is currently beyond me (most things are, but that's an
excuse and maybe ... it could be a project) so it is essentially a
hypothetical question.

G

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