Almagest Stars - Planetarium program for the Almagest star catalog
http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/astro/almagest.html


What It Is
==========

Almagest Stars is a Windows and Linux program that plots the stars of
the Almagest catalog overlaid on a visually realistic rendering of the
night sky.  For each star, the program can display Ptolemy's description
of the star's position within the figure of the constellation, his
values for its longitude, latitude, and magnitude, and the modern
identification of the star.

With a single keystroke, you can compare the data from three different
reconstructions of the catalog:  the 1913 German translation of the
Almagest by Karl Manitius (updated in 1963), the 1915 work on the
catalog by C.H.F. Peters and Edward Knobel, and the modern consensus
represented by the 1984 English translation of the Almagest by G.J.
Toomer and the 1990 monograph on the catalog by Gerd Grasshoff.

See readme.html for more detailed information.

Almagest Stars is free software.  The Linux version is made available
under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
See the file named COPYING for specifics.


Dependencies
============

Almagest Stars uses GTK+ 2 as its widget library, and uses cairo 1.x to
produce PDF output.  For GTK+, the minimum version is 2.4.0, since the
program uses the file chooser dialog introduced in that version.  For
cairo, the minimum version is 1.0.0, but PDF output is greatly improved
in more recent versions.

In order to build Almagest Stars, you need the developer components of
the GTK+ and cairo packages (primarily the C header files), not just the
runtime libraries.


Compiling
=========

See the INSTALL file for build instructions.


History
=======

Almagest Stars was originally written for Windows and was released as
free (as in beer) software in binary form in September, 2006.  In
January 2007 I created a dual-boot system with SuSE 10.1 and ported
Almagest Stars to Linux.  A short paper about the program has been
accepted by a history of astronomy journal and will hopefully appear
sometime in mid-2007.
