Hello everyone,<br><br>I'm excited to inform that after a long time spent on polishing and<br>bug fixing, I finally merged the gsoc2012-samxan branch to master.<br>A new feature called "What's Interesting..." has been introduced to<br>
KStars, which aims to suggest "interesting" sky-objects for viewing,<br>while taking into account the night-sky conditions (how light-polluted<br>the night-sky is) and availability or unavailability of equipments.<br>
<br>On clicking the What's Interesting... (hereafter termed as WI) option<br>under the Tools menu, the WI settings dialog comes up which allows<br>the user to rate the night-sky (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_Dark-Sky_Scale" target="_blank">Bortle Dark-Sky Scale</a> ) and to<br>
provide eqipment specifications if available.<br><br>After the above mentioned configurations are made, the main QML<br>interface appears as a QDockWidget to the right side of the skymap.<br>The QML UI consists of the sky-object <b>category selection view</b>,<br>
where the user can choose from different sky-object categories<br>like Planets, Stars, Galaxies, etc. On choosing any such category,<br>the list of "interesting" sky-objects of that category is displayed<br>in the <b>sky-object list view</b>. Selecting any sky-object item from<br>
this list opens the <b>sky-object details-view</b>. The details-view<br>displays the following details for each sky-object:<br><ol><li>Name of the sky-object.</li><li>Approximate position where the sky-object is visible.</li>
<li>Surface brightness.</li><li>Magnitude</li><li>Size</li><li>Information about the object (Information taken from wikipedia.<br>Available only for Planets for now)</li><li>Option to slew the skymap to the sky-object.</li>
<li>Option to view more details.<br></li></ol>The transitions between these three different views are smooth and<br>not bad to look at. Options to reload the list of interesting sky-objects<br>
and to open the WI settings dialog from the QML UI are available<br>in the sky-object category selection view.<br><br>Please try out this new feature and provide feedback.<br><br>Regards,<br>-- <br>Samikshan Bairagya<br>
(Freenode IRC nick: samxan)<br>