[Kstars-devel] Some user feedback

[Alexey Khudyakov]

> 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.

Yes I do. And how are stars and other objects stored in memory?


> > 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.

Yes, I can, and this is really nice feature. But it has one disadvantage
it's slow. Adding merely 129 planetary nebulae takes about 30 seconds. List
clearing take same amount of time. What can be cause of such slowness?


> > 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.

And this is connected closely to point above. Now there are a _lot_ of
faint objects on sky map. They are nearly invisible. If they will be
rendered as symbols map would be filled with faint galaxies. And we would
need to set cut off magnitude. May be manually, may be via some
auto-adjustment, may be via some combination.


> 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).

Do you mean small label which appears near sky object when I hold mouse
cursor on it. It's simply faster to right-click on star than wait for
pop-up. This is matter of opinion.


> "not sufficient for me" != "bad or non-existent"
I've forgot to mark that with four letters: "IMHO"