[Mageia-dev] Calling all astronomers both amateur and professional

Sun Oct 28 06:16:46 CET 2012

Hi all,
+
+The mentors are helping me get my packages uploaded, so I'm looking for 
+more things to package.  My background is computational astrophysics so 
+there are about a dozen packages in theoretical astrophysics that I'm 
+going to package for Mageia once it I get set up.  However, I'm 
+interested in trying to make Mageia a strong platform for astronomy.  
+One thing about linux is that it unites amateur and professional 
+communities in a way that isn't possible before.  People doing backyard 
+experiments can use image processing tools that are available to 
+professional astronomers, and part of what I'd like to do is to make 
+those tools more accessible.
+
+I have a background in computational astrophysics, so I know what 
+packages need to be added in that area.  However, I have little 
+background in observational astronomy (particularly amateur astronomy) 
+and also very little background in astronomy education (particularly 
+k-12).  So I don't know what packages need to be packaged in that area.  
+For example, there are about a dozen projects on telescope control out 
+there, but I need some feedback from someone who is actually trying to 
+run amateur astronomy experiments so know which one I should change to 
+an RPM.  I'm going to start reaching out so some contacts I have in the 
+astronomy community, but before I do that, I'd like to see if there are 
+any astronomers (either amateur or professional) here on this list.
+
+One other thing is that Mageia is particularly well set up to work as 
+platform for scientific computing.  Astronomers want to do astronomy and 
+not system administration, so this means that you have to have 
+easy-to-use tools to set up the system, and distributions that are 
+focused toward computer geeks don't work.  At the same time, both 
+professional and amateur astronomers don't work in a corporate business 
+environment, which means that enterprise distributions also aren't set 
+up for scientific computing.  Mageia has I think the right structure for 
+becoming the linux distribution of choice for astronomy.
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