Linux / Slackware and "Skychart" controlling hobby telescope

[Per Christensen]

Sorry to bother with yet another rant! Due to circumstances (the
pandemic) I'm at the moment located elsewhere than at home, and enjoy
the absence of daily chores.
This morning I messaged with my spouse chatting about the present clear,
cold and sunlit winter weather we have had for weeks, pondering over the
earths "wobbling" around our local star (the Sun) and how our orbit
fortunately is not too near (as hot Venus) or too far (like cold Mars)
from the Suns nuclear fusions.
From and then I explore the sky with my quite old motorized telescope
controlled either from it's wired control pad or from a Windows 98
portable connected to the telescope via a serial link.
The set-up - with an old version of the planetarium "Cartes du Ciel" and
a portable PC with a dead battery - works fine, where it just is to
point and click on a visible object on a sky-map, and the telescope will
align to it's position.
I now find that Patrick Chevalley's great planetarium software will run
on Slackware (also 32bit). I suppose his 2019 "Skychart" (formerly
"Cartes du Ciel") 4.2.1 will support and control a large majority of
today's (in fact reasonable) automated hobby telescopes.
The planetarium is great also if just using a pair of (7x50) binoculars
- visit the Andromeda galaxy and the Orion nebula using the peripheral
vision!

https://sourceforge.net/projects/skychart/
skychart-4.2.1-4073-linux_i386.tar.xz

The planetarium is build on Lazarus / Free Pascal and depend on
"libpasastro"

From the SourceForge website:

git clone https://github.com/pchev/libpasastro.git
cd libpasastro
Then compile and install:

make clean all
sudo make install PREFIX=/usr
sudo ldconfig

[King Beowulf]

On Sat, 6 Feb 2021 17:11:32 +0100, Per Christensen wrote:

> Sorry to bother with yet another rant! Due to circumstances (the
> pandemic) I'm at the moment located elsewhere than at home, and enjoy
> the absence of daily chores.

Heck, this is USENET. Rant away!

> From and then I explore the sky with my quite old motorized telescope
> controlled either from it's wired control pad or from a Windows 98
> portable connected to the telescope via a serial link.

--snip---

I have some package buildscripts in Slackbuilds.org doe the INDI library
for astro-gadget control.

https://indilib.org/

It's a library and set of drivers that ties into various astronomy
software.

I hope to find time to update libindi since support is already in KDE/
plasma5 KStars (KDE FrameWork 4). When I upgrade my scope I look forward
to some nice point-n-click as well as getting some use from the ZWO ASI
CMOS camera!