Jasem Mutlaq 

The excitement of discovery is not confined within the realm of professional astronomy only, amateur astronomers have contributed to many significant discoveries including spotting Supernova 1987A, several comets, and even exo-planets! As the hardware used to observe the night sky gets more sophisticated, affordable, and sensitive, so does the sophistication and variety of the software. One of the primary issues for amateur astronomers utilizing Linux is not the lack of hardware support as it was often the case a few years ago. Nowadays most astronomical hardware is well supported under Linux, with the exception of a few cameras and auxiliary devices. However, what is severely lacking is a complete software suite that caters to the needs of amateur astronomers. As it stands now, you have a plethora of astronomy and control applications in Linux that cater to different stages of the amateur astronomer astrophotography train: You can use App X to control the telescope and camera, App B to perform guiding, App Z to focus, and none of these applications talk to each other! If you want to perform stacking, you have to find another program, and list just goes on. This can be incredibly frustrating for amateur astronomers new to Linux, and even those with experience. Last year, I purchased a 120mm aprochromatic refractor telescope, Quantum Scientific Imaging (QSI) CCD camera , Starlight Xpress Lodestar autoguider, and RoboFocus. There, I was set for astrophotography! Read More

On August 1st, we had a partial solar eclipse in Kuwait, covering about 18% of the solar disk. Part of the event involved showing live view of the eclipse from the Ujari Observatory, which relies on KStars for control. So we got a hand held video cam, an adapter to attach it to a short focal length telescope (which is mounted on the same equatorial fork base of the primary telescope), and a long video cable connecting two 46" LCDs in the ground and first floor levels of the astronomy & space sciences department. Read More

KStars should have a decent telescope control by 3.2. The current client/server architecture in INDI is scalable and would be very handy in observatories or when controlling multiple telescopes. I haven't committed anything in quite a while as I have been moving from one location to another within town and will finally settle soon! Read More