This site will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
Software tools greatly simplify many tedious tasks related to planetary research. Below, I list several tools that I frequently use, and I provide some scripts that I have found useful in my work. In a few instances, I provide some issues I've had in getting these programs to work on my systems (Linux and WinPC-Cygwin).
Below, I provide links to mapping and image processing software I've found to be useful in my work. Eventually, I will add sections on how to use GRASS for planetary work and sample Gemeric Mapping Tools scripts.
GRASS is a freely available, open source GIS package for Unix and Unix-like environments. With minor tweaks, GRASS can be used to analyze remote sensing datasets covering non-Earth planets.
GMT, maintained by Paul Wesel and Michael Smith at the Unviersity of Hawaii, is a set of ANSI-C programs for producing publication-quality figures for journals. However, GMT also contains routines useful for quantitative analyses of various datasets. GMT programs can be invoked from the command line or from scripts. The GMT authors provide scripts written in csh. I prefer to use PERL scripts. The GMT online manual could use some work, but the GMT tutorial comes with many useful and instructive scripts. GMT also comes with some of the most useful and complete man pages I've ever seen.
ISIS is a software package produced by USGS for planetary image processing.
NASA World Wind is a a client package which downloads terrain files and images from servers. Currently, topographic rendering of Earth, Moon, and Mars are possible. Planetary images of Venus, Jupiter, and the Galilean satellites are also available. A substantial community of contributers have written plug-ins to expand World Wind's capabilities. Currently, NASA World Wind is only available for MS Windows operating systems.
Celestia is a freeware space simulator which allows the user to fly around the Solar System.
XEphem is a free (as in beer) package for amateur and professional astronomers. In addition to providing sky maps, XEphem also includes image processing tools, telescope controls, and plotting tools. The GUI is X-Windows ugly, but very usable.
Home Planet is an MS Windows package which provides sky maps, lunar phase data, and satellite tracking among other features.
Cygwin is a very nice UNIX emulator for Windows. Several UNIX-based scientific packages have been compiled for Cygwin. I've also found that many packages that have not been compiled for Cygwin are readily compiled from the source code with little or no changes required.
Gnuplot is a free (as in beer) package which produces nice plots suitable for scientific publicaitons.