[Kstars-devel] Using kstars to produce an animation

[Alessio Sangalli]

Hi, I would like to use Kstars to produce an animation made of many 
frames of the sky "dumped" by kstars.

The animation would be very simple: with the time stopped at a certain 
date, the camera points to Alt 0 Az 90; then it goes up until Alt 60 Az 
180 and reaches Alt 0 Az 270 at the end of the animation. I'd need some 
hundred of frames, each one a little step different from the previous.

My first idea was to use a script like the following, substitute the 
strings for Alt and Az, and call kstars --script in a loop.

#
KSTARS=`dcopfind -a 'kstars*'`
MAIN=KStarsInterface
CLOCK=clock#1
dcop $KSTARS $MAIN  setAltAz 0 90
dcop $KSTARS $MAIN  setLocalTime 2004 5 12 0 0 0
dcop $KSTARS $MAIN  zoom 1000
dcop $KSTARS $CLOCK stop
##


This has many disadvantages, first it's pretty ugly (is there a way to 
pass parameters to this script?) second, and perhaps more important, 
each time Kstars reloads all the data, using a large amount of time.

Do you have any idea to solve the problem in a smart way?

Thank you
Alessio Sangalli