Observation Planning and Navigation
The first group of programs in the VM are intended to help plan observations:

Aladin - -is an interactive sky atlas downloading and combining sky survey data in a variety of wavelengths to assemble views of user specified objects or location with an adjustable field of view.
Autostar Suite - -Is an interactive planetarium/sky atlas that allows the user to select the field of view, multiple preloaded and user supplied catalogs. Different projections are selectable. Emphmerides are computed with selectable levels of astrometric precision. It will also download Palomar Digital Sky Survey images of the current field of view.
Stellarium - -is an interactive graphical planetarium featuring life like graphics.
Tilting Sun - -is an interactive graphical ephemeris of the Sun. It calculates the suns apparent location, P and B angles and shows the apparent lines of solar latitude and longitude for a given Epoch.
Virtual Moon - -is an interactive lunar atlas that includes an extensive collection of lunar feature photographs and accurately calculates illumination, nutation and precession.

Image Processing

Astro ImageJ

- is an extension of ImageJ, a Java based image processing package commonly used in the life sciences that has been extended to handle FITS images and has special processing extension for the extraction of time series photometry and specific tools for handling the analysis of extra-solar transits.

Autostar Image Processing

- is a FITs image processing program, a part of the Autostar Suite. It handles image calibration, stacking, rotation, alignment, color syntheses and can operate efficiently on large collections of images. It also performs spectra processing and aperture photometry.

Envisage

- Is a part of the Autostar Suite,. It is a FITS image processing package that is optimized for aligning and stacking collections of short exposure images.

Gimp

- short for “GNU Image Manipulation Program” is a free open source developed raster graphics editor program. It is designed to fulfill editing requirement similar to those handled by Photosho(tm).

Photoscape

- is a light weight photo editor that facilitates easy assembly of image mosaics and GIF time series animations for presentations.

Pyraf

- is a python interface to IRAF to provide both a GUI interface to IRAF and provide a more robust scripting interface to the IRAF package library.

Registax

- is a free software package for alignment and stacking images. It excels at selecting and stacking planetary images captured with high cadence imaging cameras by selecting a subset of frames showing the least seeing distortion.

Ureka/Iraf

- is a complete installation of IRAF with all of the Space Telescope Science Institute’s extension packages.

VuePrint

-a simple image display , editing and slide show generator.

Modeling & Analysis Tools

GalaSim

A simple N-body simiulation of interacting galaxies.

LEPhot

Large Ensemble Photometry is an interactive program that automates analysis of photometric time series images by fitting observations against APASS standards stars in the observed field. The program also generates export files and AAVSO observation reports. Additionally, it does period fitting and outputs graphical reports.

Nightfall

is an interactive binary star modeling software package that seeks to find best fit star models to observation data loaded into the program. It provides graphical output of the model, the fit, and 3D animations of the system.

Period 04

A program that analyzes data sequences using Fourier analysis to determine the frequency spectra making up the series. It is useful in period search fitting and is particularly well suited to systems having multiple periods or oscillation modes.

Phoebe

PHOEBE stands for PHysics Of Eclipsing BinariEs. It is a program for modeling eclipsing binary stars based on photometric and radial velocity data. PHOEBE is based on the Wilson and Devinney modeling code. More sophisticated than NightFall, the tool works best when both radial velocity and photometric data are available.

Reduc

A program designed to construct diffraction limited images using speckle interferometry and “lucky imaging’ from a long sequence of short exposure telescopic images. It is useful in astrometry, double star analysis and proper motion studies.

ISIS Spectroscopy

A software for calibrating, processing, and analyzing astronomical spectra. It has an interactive GUI interface and can handle slitless, long slit and eschelle spectra.

Symbolic Math and Graphing

GNU Plot

A general purpose plotting and charting program and can be script driven to provide animated graphics.

SMath Studio

A package that provides features and services similar to those found in Mathcad™. It can typeset equations, find symbolic or numerical solutions to systems of equations and provide graphical output.

Speed Crunch

A powerful desktop calculator that allows for the creation of variables and functions. It includes a comprehensive library of scientific and mathematical constants and formulas. It operates in an extended precision mode. Units and radix are selectable.

Office and Utilities

Filezilla FTP Client

An FTP client program with a graphical user interface for moving files over the Internet.

Firefox Web Browser

A popular free open source Internet browser

Geany IDE

A GUI integrated software development systems with a powerful built in text editor. It is well suited to the development of data pipeline processing scripts. It includes several such examples.

Libre Office Calc Libre Office Drawing
Libre Office Formulas
Libre Office Impress
Libre Office Writer

A family of free, open source programs that provide functions similar to Microsoft Office™. These program are capable of reading and writing file formats compatible with MS Office as well as their native file types.

Real VNC Client

A Virtual Network Console Client software package. It allows the control of a remote PC over the Internet. It is useful for control PC’s at remote observatories. This package’s license is free for individual and educational users, but not for commercial user. Free VNC Host software is available for Linux, Windows and OSX systems

Programming and Scripting

The CUREA VM includes in its Linux installation development tools for programming in C, C++, Fortran, Python, Perl and Java. A simple integrated development environment (IDE) GEANY supports the development of scripts and extensions to the supplied functionality. The VM is not intended as a program development platform. For simple scripting and utility programming, Python is the preferred language.

References
The VM Desktop has three folders, “Manuals” “Papers” and “Ebooks:. The “Manuals” folder contains reference manuals, tutorials and quick reference guides for the astronomy applications included in the system. They are all in PDF format and are available offline.

The "Papers" directory contains a collection of article reprints grouped by categories. The categories include:

Observational Methods
N-Body Problems
Astronomical Standards

Additionally, there is a brief outline of a number of project ideas intended to develop observational astronomy skills that can be done with a small telescope over several days.

Finally, the "Ebooks" directory contains a collection free text and reference books on astronomy. The set includes:

An Introduction to Astronomical Photometry Using CCDs, Romanishin (2002)
Cambridge University Press Handbook of Space Astronomy and Astrophysics, Zombeck (1990)
Fundamental Numerical Methods and Data Analysis, Collins (2003)
Introduction to the HST Data Handbooks, Space Telescope Science Institute (2011)
The Foundations Of Celestial Mechanics, Collins(2004)
The Fundamentals of Stellar Astrophysics, Collins (2003)
The Virial Theorem In Stellar Astrophysics, Collins (2003)
A Photographic Atlas Of Selected Regions Of The Milky Way, Vols 1 & 2, Barnard (1927)

Catalogs
The VM desktop contains a "Catalogs" folder with a wide variety of astronomical catalogs:

Adccdrom

A complete copy of the NASA's Astronomical Data Center’s CD-ROM, Selected Astronomical Catalogs, Volume I

Arp

A catalog of irregular or interacting galaxies

Barnard

E.E. Barnard's catalog of dark nebulas (molecular clouds).

Caldwell

Patrick Moore's catalog of bright deep sky objects omitted from Messier’s list.

ColorVsEffTemp, Pecaut, M (2013)

A table of color index in a variety of common photometric standards against the effective temperature for dwarf stars for spectral classes 0V through TV.

Exoplanets, Butler et al. (2006)

A catalog of nearby expolanets that were spectroscopically detected.

Fraunhofer Lines

A Graphical catalog of common named Fraunhofer spectral lines.

GravLens, Maoz (1993)

A catalog of gravitationally lensed distant quasars.

Hickson

A catalog of compact interacting galaxy groups.

Hipparcos, ESA (1997)

Volume one of the Tycho & Hipparcos astrometric and photometric catalogs.

Kepler Eclipsing Binaries, Matijevic (2012)

A catalog of eclipsing binary stars discovered by the Kepler 1 mission.

Kepler Exo Planets

A catalog of confirmed transiting expolanets from the Kepler 1 mission.

Lunar Eclipses

A canon of lunar eclipses from 2000 through 2100.

Meteor Showers

A catalog of 72 know meteor showers. Including their date, duration, flux and radiants.

Quasars, Hewitt (1993)

A catalog of bright quasars.

SAO SPEC

A table of SAO stars brighter than Magnitude 4.0, suitable for long slit spectroscopy with small aperture telescopes.

SDSS-Johnson-Cousins Transforms, SDSS (2013)

A catalog of methods for transforming Sloan filter photometry to and from the Johnson-Cousins filter photometry.

Sharpless

A J2000 catalog of H II emission line regions in the Milky Way.

Spectra, Jacoby (1984)

A catalog of stellar spectra standards for most spectral classes of stars. Additionally included is a python program to resample any of the catalog spectra at the dispersion of your spectrograph.

Stellar Class Color Indices, STSci (2018)

A table of Johnson-Cousins color indices vs stellar spectral type.

Sun

Orbital pseudo elements for The Sun formulated as "anti-Earth". These elements can be programmed into computerized telescopes and planetarium programs to allow pointing at the Sun. USE WITH CAUTION. Your vision, telescopes and cameras are all at risk if this is done without proper filters and protection.