This shall be the start of new journey.
Some decades ago, my parents bought me a telescope and I spent lots of nights in the garden looking at the stars. Unfortunately I grew old, went to university, got a job, moved to well-lit places and had almost no more opportunities to look at the night sky. I could only read books, papers or magazines.
For all the years my little telescope went along with me. Though I didn’t use it anymore (and probably wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway), it could at least bring back old memories. During my last move I had to save space and I needed to part with my telescope. But something is missing now and I decided to spend more time with astronomy again.
In almost every article I read in the magazines, people only use some proprietary software to process their data. At best some binaries were available, but no author published their sources. As being a supporter of open source software, this makes me wonder, whether there is no open source software available for astronomical topics or whether there is just some advertising missing.
So a good deal of the time I spend on my new journey will be used to look for open source software and promote its usage. As I am a Debian Developer I will create packages from all suitable software and add them to the Debian archive. Thus all users of Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu can search a package list to find their favorite software and afterwards are able to install the software by simply doing ‘apt install’.
Luckily I don’t have to start from scratch. There is already a similar movement within the Debian Project , called Debian Astro. This group of people already provide about 300 packages from all kind of astronomical topics. For example packages exist to analyze data obtained by radio astronomy or to control telescopes or to get data from the virtual observatory. A complete package list is also available.
If you know of some good software that needs to be added, please send me an email.