Cartes Du Ciel or Stellarium

Hello all! My first post here.

My ultimate goal for the Pi is to use it as a tool (or in my case, a toy) in my observatory to display the astronomy charting software Cartes Du Ciel. Now, the program is compatible with Linux but not currently ARM so my installation was unsuccessful. I also want to have PDF documents saved with coordinates and images of deep space objects for visual observing.

Has anyone figured out how to install this software? Or anything else that is similar like Stellarium? I'm very interested in this. I have quite a bit of experience with web coding (HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP...) but not with standalone software.

-CJ

AIUI astronomy software tends to be quite "heavy" (large databases, complex maths, etc.) so possibly not best suited to the limited resources of the RasPi?

Have you tried installing Stellarium directly? It is supported on Debian wheezy, although it's quite slow...

I think Cartes Du Ciel would run lighter than Stellarium. I did try to install Stellarium the other day but it froze immediately after opening, so that's a "no go". Cartes Du Ciel pretty much uses basic colors for charting instead of graphically intense gradients like Stellarium. Much less animation.

If there's a wealth if excellent astronomy apps for iOS devices, I don't see "why not" for the Pi. I know it can't handle the GPU power of an iPhone but astronomy software doesn't have to be "beautiful". White dots for stars, gral ovals for galaxies, yellow dotted circles for star clusters...it plausible.

If you can find an astronomy app that uses OpenGLES rather than OpenGL (I have no reccomendations as it's not my area of interest), there's no reason it shouldn't look more beautiful than any iOS app - the GPU in the Raspi is very powerful, it's only the CPU that is (relatively) slow.