[Kstars-devel] Some user feedback

[Jason Harris]

Hi Alexey,

Thanks for the feedback.

On Sunday 27 May 2007 14:47, Alexey Khudyakov wrote:
> 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.
>
Adding more stars is trivial.  I think I even have the kstars-formatted 
Hipparcos catalog down to 12th magnitude on disk.  The problem is adding 
millions of stars without bogging down the program or having ridiculous 
memory requirements.  The way to do it is to selectively load faint stars 
only in the region immediately surrounding the current focus point, and only 
at high zoom.  We had someone working on the infrastructure required to do 
this, but we haven't seen the results.  Let me know if you want to know more 
about it.

> 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. 
"not sufficient for me" != "bad or non-existent"

> 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.
It's an interesting idea, but why don't you just create an observing list of 
all theglobular clusters?  That automatically highlights GCs in the map.  
We'd need a way to add this feature without cluttering the interface for 
the>90% of the users who wouldn't care about it.

> 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.
Good ideas; I would welcome patches for these changes.

> 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.
I don't want to put coordinates in the popup menu; they are better placed in 
the details window.  I'm also not excited about putting the magnitude there; 
you can already display stellar mags directly on the sky map, if that's what 
you are interested in.  I'd be more willing to put magnitudes and angular 
sizes in the "object infobox" (the floating box showing name and coordinates 
of the currently-focused object).

> P.P.S Sorry for my english :-)
>
Nonsense, your english is very good!

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