[Kstars-devel] Some user feedback

[Akarsh Simha]

> 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.

I think this is one of the major shortcomings of KStars, which is why
I end up using skychart which doesn't have a friendly interface like
KStars. As far as I can see, this will require a re-ordering of the
Hiparcos catalog data into files with given RA ranges and each file
having stars down to 12th mag. I think this is worth working on. Can
you tell me the details?

On 5/28/07, Jason Harris <jharris at 30doradus.org> wrote:
> 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!
>
> --
> KStars: http://edu.kde.org/kstars
> Community Forums: http://kstars.30doradus.org
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>


-- 
Regards,
     Akarsh
http://www.bas.org.in
http://www.nascent-technologies.com