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

[Joseph Wang]

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.