[Kstars-devel] Inaccurate Catalogs?

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi

> Welcome back!

Thanks Jason.

> The trouble is, there is no good GPL-compatible deep-sky catalog that I am 
> aware of.  The one that ships with kstars was cobbled together by me from 
> various public-domain sources, and it's missing a lot of data like photometry 
> and size/position angle.  If someone were inclined to do a better job 
> creating a GPL-compatible deep-sky catalog, that would be a great way to 
> contribute to KStars.

What about this one? I've seen many commercial and free software use this.
(eg: SkyMap Pro, and Cartes du Ciel)
I however couldn't find any license agreement whatsoever...
http://www.saguaroastro.org/content/downloads.htm

I have found this database to be extremely useful, with a lots of extra information,
apart from what we already have. (eg: separate B and V magnitudes, NGC descriptions)
Since we're now in a feature-freeze, I guess we wouldn't want to use all this extra
information.

This is not in our catalog format, and I wouldn't mind taking up the fairly trivial
task of converting this into our catalog format.

> The Steinecke catalog that you can download with the Ctrl+D tool is much 
> better.  However, its license specifies that it is free for non-commercial 
> uses only, which is not compatible with the GPL, so it can't be included as 
> part of KStars.

Oh... ok. I overlooked that!

> In the case of NGC 2090, the 11.9 magnitude is from the RC3.  It's a B-band 
> magnitude.

Are all the magnitudes that we have in our catalogs B-band?
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