I was a bit too late with this for the NX0.5 release... but here it is, a new version of CelNav:
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*** NX0.4 users please see reply to this post below ***
The biggest change over the version that comes with NX0.5 is the addition of a new "Planet Finder" tab:
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planet_finder_tab.png [ 80.85 KiB | Viewed 62924 times ]
The idea is to show you at a glance when which planets will be above the horizon at your location and therefore available for a fix. The original idea wasn't mine - I saw something similar in the XEphem documentation and just tweaked it a bit. Tihe light grey shaded areas indicate twilight at your location, the dark stuff is night and yellow means the planet is "up" at that time.
There are a few more changes/additions in this new version:
- The Alamanac tab has a new "Star Data" button. pressing this button will generate a csv file with SHA, declination and magnitude for the 57 navigational stars plus Polaris. The file will also list Azimuth and Altitude for these stars at the time and location entered by the user. This can be used as a simple star finder in planning a sight.
- Both the Almanac Page and the Star Data csv files now list all angular vaule in two formats. One is signed degrees with decimal fractions the other is the more humanly readable format from the Nautical ALmanac (e. g. N 30 54.3). The former is suitable for sorting, filtering or use in calculations while the latter may be handy if you wanted to printed these files as a paper reference.
- On the Almanac tab you now also find semi diameter data for Sun and Moon. Hence you can now get everything that is in the Nautical Alamanac's daily pages on this tab.
- You no longer have to specify a file name when pressing the "Almanac Page" or "Star Data" buttons. CelNav will create the csv file in a temporary directory and open it in Gnumeric without bugging you. If you want to save the file somewhere you can do so from Gnumeric with File->Save As.... The temporary directory will be removed when you close CelNav.
- Some application parameters can be configured via a new celnav.ini file that will be put into the $HOME/.celnav directory. Most notably the ini file sets the lat and lon values to which the entry fields in CelNav will be initialized when the application starts.
- The nxcn shell script (in /usr/local/bin) has been modified. Before it launches CelNav it updates the lat/lon values in celnav.ini with the current values found in /etc/nx.lat and /etc/nx.lon. Under Navigatrix these latter two files will automatically be kept up to date with your latest GPS position (provided you have a GPS plugged into your computer).
- The celnav.ini and celnav.log files can be accessed via the file menu
- The log file now has column headings so you don't have to guess anymore whether that value in column 47 was the date portion of the time of a sight or your mother's birthday.
- There now is a separate "Write Log" button on the "Sight Reduction & Fix" tab (formerly "2-LOP Fix" tab). Sight and fix data will only be logged when you press this button rather than everytime you press "Update Fix".
- There is reasonably detailed help available under the new menu.
- Big change "under the hood": While the old version used the separate aa application (part of nx) to calculate ephemeris data for stars, the new version now uses PyEphem for all ephemeris calculations. This is however configurable in the celnav.ini file. If you ever come across a descrepancy and want to revert to aa you can set the STAR_CALC parameter in celnav.ini to "aa". CelNav will log in celnav.log which value for STAR_CALC was in effect when it was launched.
INSTALLATION:
Installation of the new version under Navigatrix should be straight forward:
- Unpack the attached archive into any directory
- In the file manager go to that directory and open the CelNav-0.2.0 folder that was extracted from the archive
- Press [F4] to open a terminal window in the current CelNav-0.2.0 directory
- At the command prompt enterCode:sudo python setup.py install
You will be asked to enter your password and then the setup script does a little magic.
That's it. when it's done, selecting Manta Menu -> Navigation -> CelNav should now launch the new version. The ini, cfg, log and error files will be in $HOME/.celnav.
The files for the old version will not be overwritten but renamed with an additional ".old" extension (the setup script will actually print a message for each file that is renamed/moved). So you can revert to the old version in case something goes horibbly wrong during installation. There also is a README file in the CelNav-0.2.0 directory with more detailed set-up information.
If you install CelNav under NX0.4 (or any other non-NX Linux system) you will need to install two additional Python packages (in NX0.5 they're already part of the plumbing):
- PyEphem for ephemeris calculations: Attachment:
- PyTtk for some GUI widgets: Attachment:
CelNav is pure Python code. Feel free to change, improve, correct it as you like. Please post any ideas, comments, bugs back to this forum so everyone else can benefit as well. Thanks!