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Free Astronomy Magazine – January-February 2025 Issue Available For Reading And Download

IC 2163 and NGC 2207

Above: IC 2163 and NGC 2207 from combined Hubble and Webb data, processed by Joseph DePasquale (STScI). From the website: These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes using Hubble's WFPC2 and Webb's MIRI instruments. See webbtelescope.org for more info.

The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (January-February 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Arabic at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

The January-February 2025 cover. Click to go to the issue.

I mentioned to our fearless leader Michele that issues with new content and issues with curated content remind me of a comment by the great jazz/fusion guitarist Steve Khan. Issues with new content are like albums with new music, where you're trying to expand repertoire and introduce new themes. Issues made of content from other sources are like albums of standards, where you're specifically trying to develop your improvisational skills In this case, it's all about curation, framing, and presentation, which is excellent in this issue (I have no doubt that the exobiological/technosignature bent of articles over the past few years will not end, perhaps with a focus on the nonsensical New Jersey drone reports from this month).

I'm also very happy to see the recent increase in the number of international conferences and symposia being included in issues (not at all unfamiliar to readers of The Reflector or Amateur Astronomy Magazine).

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GaussSum 3.0 apt-get Install simpledialog Fix In Ubuntu 24.04 (Others)

Above: Just needed an output from GaussSum for show-and-tell. This image from the article "Computational Study of Benzothiazole Derivatives for Conformational, Thermodynamic and Spectroscopic Features and Their Potential to Act as Antibacterials," available at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4352/12/7/912.

Continuing on the Ubuntu 24.04(.1) migration theme and in the thick of needing a program to simply prepare partial Density-of-States (that link, but in this case for molecular systems) analyses, users might find themselves working through the python3, numpy, gnuplot, cclib, python3-tk installation process on the old GaussSum Installing on Linux page without knowing that gausssum 3.0 has been available as a stand-alone apt-get for several recent Ubuntu versions.

apt-get GaussSum (3.0) after 502 MB of installs and one line change to preferencesbox.py

That, minus the amount of dependencies that get installed to make the program happen, is the good news.

First attempting to run gausssum from a terminal after this apt-get install produces the following:

user@machine:~$ gausssum 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gausssum", line 23, in <module>
    import gausssum.gausssumgui
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/gausssumgui.py", line 27, in <module>
    from gausssum.preferencesbox import PreferencesPopupBox
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/preferencesbox.py", line 21, in <module>
    class PreferencesPopupBox(simpledialog.Dialog):
                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^
NameError: name 'simpledialog' is not defined

As much as https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25905540/importerror-no-module-named-tkinter looks like an answer to the problem, the solution is a simple change at the very top of preferencesbox.py that can be found in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9570550/pythons-tkinter-simpledialog-askstring-not-working-from-command-prompt (I didn't bother to ask ChatGPT just to help keep the SO traffic up). Use your editor of choice:

sudo nano /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gausssum/preferencesbox.py

and make the following change to line 17:

import tkinter.simpledialog as simpledialog

After that, type gausssum, click on Help > About, and you should see the above, minus the previous NE-1 install in the background from the last post.

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NanoEngineer-1 Version 1.1.1 – Still A Go-To In Ubuntu 24.04

Above: A six-stranded triple-crossover (TX) DNA Junction (again). See Ned Seeman's ACS interview for more background (also again).

With great thanks to Bryan Bishop for keeping his github account alive, a very old version of NE1 sitting on a fresh install of Ubuntu 24.04.

Sixteen years (!) since its release, it's still something I return to regularly because it does a very specific set of operations very well (I'd say that even if I didn't help with the development). Having made the leap on one of my machines to get used to anything new in 24.04 ("Noble Numbat." And re-testing all my other usual apt-gets to see what else I'm using from a decade ago that still has a chance of loading), trying NanoEngineer-1 (NE1) was on my short list of "if this doesn't work, I ain't upgrading" apps.

Bryan Bishop's github repo for Version 1.1.1 is alive (some highlights from the old gallery included) and the program is still kicking with this new install. I note that googling "NanoEngineer-1" now takes you to his page first above others, which is great.

This post is just an FYI – NE1 still runs like a charm. From his download link and how-to, it's a simple few steps.

My only installs on 24.04 include:

sudo apt-get install mesa-utils libx11-dev

And I'm not entirely sure about needing the libx11-dev. The snippet below taken from the github readme will have you running:

# download the ready-made chroot archive (600 MB)
wget http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/nanoengineer/nanoengineer-chroot.tar.gz

# extract the chroot
tar -zxvf nanoengineer-chroot.tar.gz

# mount these things if you want the GUI to work
for i in etc/resolv.conf tmp proc dev; do sudo mount --bind /$i nanoengineer-chroot/$i; done

# allow connections from other uids over the local X11 socket
xhost +local:

# jump in
sudo chroot nanoengineer-chroot/

# now run nanoengineer
su nanoengineeruser -c "python ~/code/nanoengineer/cad/src/main.py"

And with that, NE1. No effort to optimize, I've not tried loading a REALLY BIG mmp file to see what might crash, but I'm happy to have at least three or four more years of access to my old mmp ("molecular machine part") files before, at worst, jumping to VirtualBox.