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

[john@csplan9.rit.edu]

> 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