Welcome to XEphem!

XEphem is an interactive astronomy program for all UNIX platforms.

To see more screenshots, scroll to the bottom of this README.

Installing XEphem

There are XEphem packages available for several operating systems.

If none of these packages is appropriate for your system, the INSTALL file explains how you can compile XEphem yourself from its source code.

Elwood Downey has generously released XEphem under the MIT License! An “XEphem” organization has been created on GitHub to host XEphem’s source code.
The XEphem community hopes to modernize the code to make it easier to compile, package, and run on modern systems. In the meantime, XEphem compiles most readily on older Linux platforms like Ubuntu 14.04.
If you want to get started immediately, a Docker image that successfully compiles and runs XEphem atop Ubuntu 14.04 is available. It’s documented in its own README file.
The repository also includes a .tito directory and xephem.spec file for building an XEphem RPM package.
Otherwise, if you want to tackle XEphem development on another platform, start with the INSTALL file in the main branch of the repository.
Direct questions to the main repository’s GitHub Discussions by clicking “New discussion” and writing up your question.