I'm plotting... stars!

Part of the reason why I bought the Eee in the first place was my attempts at literature. And as part of that, I 'need' a star map. Much like a fish needs a bike, but...

Now, the Eee comes with the universe preinstalled, in the shape of KStars - an interactive, accurate graphical simulation of the night sky from anywhere on Earth. And that was, in fact, the trouble. I needed to get off the planet.

Now, a little bit of digging at Atomic Rockets - a most excellent resource for anyone interested in hard science fiction - revealed StarPlot. Not only lightweight, but also in the repositories I have pinned. Success!

Or, so I thought.

Turns out, StarPlot only comes with a few test stars in it's internal database. So off I go again, finding in the repositories the Gliese dataset. More stars than you can shake a very big stick at. A very big stick indeed. Download goes smooth, and we have success!

Uhm. No.

Turns out the Gliese dataset is not in the 'proper' format for StarPlot to read. However, I wasn't very deep into the documentation when I found what needed: the stardata-common package provides hooks to automagicaly convert stardata on your system to a StarPlot dataset. And yes, stardata-common was also in my pinned repositories.

So, download. Watch the percentage scroll. Open StarPlot, point the program towards the right dataset... Success!

So, to summarize:

sudo apt-get install starplot

sudo apt-get install gliese

sudo apt-get install stardata-common

sudo apt-get clean

Result: I can see the relationship between stars in three dimensions, from any point in space.