A stargazing background

I always enjoy seeing the system monitor displays that people sometimes have on their desktops—typically using conky—but I can't imagine needing to quickly monitor the temperature of my CPU or what my network usage is. As an astronomy educator and enthusiast, though, having stargazing information easily available would be great.

So which information would be useful? The first thing I wanted to focus on was a star chart. There is a lot of great planetarium software available that can be used to display the night sky (and more), but for generating star charts, it's hard to beat Cartes du Ciel. Perhaps the most important point in its favor in this case is the ability to generate bitmaps via the command line.

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