[Kstars-devel] Scripting help

[Yannick Gingras]

Hi, let me first state that kstars is great and that it greatly helped
me to learn and enjoy the sky. I'd like to use kstars to dump sky maps
with selected objects highlighted.  I can set the orientation of the
sky and the zoom just the way I like but I haven't found hot to attach
labels to objects from a script.  Is it possible?  What I'd like to do
is to selected a few dozen objects and to print 2 sky maps with all
those highlighted, one for north, one for south view.  Also, it seems
that my time settings are ignored.  I can set the date without problem
but the time either falls back to CPU time or to noon.  I tried

kstars --dump --filename foo.png --script ./export.kstars --date "2005-10-29 00:00:00"
kstars --dump --filename foo.png --script ./export.kstars --date "$(date +"%Y-%m-%d") 01:00:00"

from the CLI and 

dcop $KSTARS $MAIN  setLocalTime 2005 10 29 1 0 0

from the script without success.  

I'm using KStars: 1.0 over KDE: 3.3.2 on Debian Sarge.  I don't know
if this is relevant but I can't run the kstars scripts from the
shell, I get messages such as

  ./export.kstars
  call failed
  object not accessible
  object not accessible
  object not accessible

but when I pass it to the --script option I get the expected result.

While I'm at it I think it would be nice to add to the wish list a way
to export the plot from the elevation tool and to add labels to the
plotted curves.  The "in the sky tonight" tool would be a lot more
usable if it had a way to filter results by magnitude and stuff like
that.  It tells me that I can see about 200 nebulae but I'd like to
pick the best ones for a particular night...

Thanks again for kstars, you guys are doing great job!

-- 
Yannick Gingras