Stellarium- a complement to Kstars

Let me tell you that my previous experience with Stellarium did not go well three years or more ago. It repeatedly crashed and I got some negative feelings over the software.

But today Stellarium redeemed itself. I was presented with a picture of a pasture in Paris and moving the mouse gave me fantastic various viewing transformations including fisheye view pleasures.

Stellarium will complement Kstars. Thankfully my harddisk (120 Gbytes) is large enough to accommodate the two or I have to pick up Kstars based only on familiarity.

When I wanted to visit Mars, I was presented with a Spirit panoramic view of Gusev crater collated from a lot of pictures.


I thank the developers of Stellarium for finally making Stellarium work flawlessly this time on the latest Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala OS.

Till then, we have to write more posts on both Stellarium and Kstars.

Kalzium- a periodic table of elements viewer

Kalzium is a free software available for Linux systems for viewing properties of the elements and for exploring the periodic table. Properties of the elements can be viewed at a glance either individually or grouped. The information on isotopes are also included and wikipedia articles are referenced. Here is a snapshot.




Click on the image for a fuller view. Kalzium is a KDE application. You should install the Kalzium helpfiles (Kalzium handbook) so as to maximize benefits in using the program. Kalzium also include a free chemical equation balancer! Clever people. Kalzium can be obtained from
http://www.kde.org/kalzium if it is not available as a package for your OS. My version of Kalzium is at 2.2.98.

So dont feel bad using Linux in the scientific computing arena. You have lots of free softwares to help you and it is our job current and future to help you maximize the use of these powerful and FREE softwares.Stay tuned for more articles on Kalzium