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macosastronomygaia

How to install and run gaia astronomical software from starlink-hikianalia

I am trying to install gaia, image software for astronomy. I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and have xcode tools 3.2.6 with developer tools installed. I also believe I have the correct gfortran compiler necessary.

How do I install gaia now? What are the commands I need to run. When I download it, it unzips and there are just a bunch of folders.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Max

Solution

  • Steps for installing Starlink Gaia

    1. Download the latest Starlink distribution (Hikianalia, as of this writing):

      http://starlink.jach.hawaii.edu/starlink/HikianaliaDownload

    2. Uncompress the .tar.gz. A new star directory will be created. You can move it some other place (for instance, /Users/Shared/star, or /star)

      1. As the installer is 0.7GB, you might want to delete it after installation has been successful.

    3. Depending on your default shell:

      1. For C (csh, tcsh) shells:

        1. Create a STARLINK_DIR environment variable pointing to where the star directory is to be left (i.e., /Users/Shared/star):

          setenv STARLINK_DIR /Users/Shared/star

        2. Source the chsrc files

          source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/login
source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/cshrc

        3. You can combine the steps above creating an alias called start_starlink to add to your .cshrc file, so that you only start the Starlink libraries when needed:

          alias start_starlink 'setenv STARLINK_DIR /Users/Shared/star; source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/login; source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/cshrc'

      2. For Bourne (sh, bash, zsh) shells:

        1. Create a STARLINK_DIR environment variable pointing to where the star directory is to be left (i.e., /Users/Shared/star):

          export STARLINK_DIR=/Users/Shared/star

        2. Source the chsrc files

          . $STARLINK_DIR/etc/profile

        3. You can combine the steps above creating an alias called start_starlink to add to your .cshrc file, so that you only start the Starlink libraries when needed:

          alias start_starlink='export STARLINK_DIR=/Users/Shared/star; . $STARLINK_DIR/etc/profile'

    So, after typing start_starlink, you can just type gaia to launch Starlink Gaia.

    Fixing a missing gfortran

    In x86_64 systems, if launching gaia fails with the message:

    dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libgfortran.3.dylib
Referenced from: /Users/jdsant/Downloads/star/bin/gaia/gaia_wish
Reason: image not found

    you need to make sure that you have gfortran libraries installed, and that they are were gaia expects them.

    You can try to use locate libgfortran.3.dylib, and copy it to /usr/local/lib , or make a symlink to it. See, for instance, http://starlink.jach.hawaii.edu/starlink/HikianaliaDownload#SnowLeopard64-bitdistribution