[Kstars-devel] Some user feedback

[Alexey Khudyakov]

Hello!

I'm student and amauter astronomer. I want to tell tell about my
exprience with kstars.
I tried it as tool for observaion planning and it turned out that
kstars isn't good enough to
be useful. But I think it could be really good.

I wrote about thing I miss/dislike in kstars. It's based on my
exprience with kstar from KDE3.5
and freshly compiled SVN version. I've interested in joining
development process. Now I'm
looking throw sources.

First and worst thing are catalogs. Star calaog is very very poor.
Faintest magnitude is 7.5m
It's not sufficient even for visual observations. And looks as joke
for astrophoto. It's relatively
easy to get 14m stars with modern equipment. (Canon EOS 300D and
fairly good lens and 5
minutes exposure) Identification of photographed object becomes impossible.

Second - filtering. I want to see only things I want too see.
Filtering abilities of kstars are between
bad and nonexistent. I can tell kstars to show me deep-sky objects and
not stars and planets
but it's not sufficient for me. I can't set kstars to display globular
clusters brighter than 10m
and stars. When I searching for globlar clusters I don't need nor
galaxies nor nebulae.
And too faint objects only clutter window and slows down rendering.

Third - deep-sky rendering. Deep-skyes are rendered as outlines. I
think, they should be filled
with some color. It's too easy to overlook them. And deepskyes smaller
than certain size should
be rendered as symbols. One pixel deep-sky is very hard to notice and
doesn't make much
sense.

Fourth - right button menu. It seems illogical for me. I expect to see
impotant parameters but I don't gt them. For stars most important
parameters are magnitude and coordinates, not spectral
class. For deep-skyes angular size adds.

And number of not-so-important wishes.


P.S Please don't tell me to put my wishes/bug reports to bug tracking
system. I know about
it and I'll post them there later. This letter is general picture from
my point of view.

P.P.S Sorry for my english :-)

---
Regards,
  Alexey