[Kstars-devel] Minor patches and a few clarifications

[Akarsh Simha]

Hello

I just managed to get the KDE development setup on my computer. KStars looks good!

I seek a few clarifications / have a few comments about KStars:

  It looks as though the colour of an O star is overexaggerated. This makes Orion's belt look a little weird, different from what one would see if he looked up to see Orion. Should we consider making the colour a little more natural?

  As I mentioned sometime earlier, it seems like we don't have a Comet database which has the parameters required for calculation of comet magnitudes. Currently, we set magnitudes of all comets to zero, and this causes all comets to be visible. This looks especially funny when you see the train of 73/P fragments with each one shown to be zero magnitude! 
What database are we using for comets? Can we use one of the IAU-MPC standard databases? Will there be license-compatibility issues?
Now that the feature freeze is over, if we can upgrade the database, I can work on a comet-magnitude patch similar to the one I submitted for asteroid magnitudes.

I've also attached two very minor patches for reviewing.
One of them fixes a small bug in ngcic.dat that lists NGC 1977 and NGC 1975 as open cluster and galaxy respectively, while both are nebulae.
They both constitute parts of the "Running Man Nebula". The Wikipedia article as well as ngcic.org database classify both these objects as nebulae.

The labels for elongated deep sky objects (like M31) at certain position angles were placed pretty far from them. I feel that taking the average of the major and minor axes gives better results, although the label might sometimes penetrate into the object boundary. The second patch implements this trivial modification.

-- 
Akarsh Simha
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: ngcic.patch
Type: text/x-diff
Size: 1051 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kstars-devel/attachments/20080129/cf5eb6db/attachment.bin 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: labels.patch
Type: text/x-diff
Size: 789 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kstars-devel/attachments/20080129/cf5eb6db/attachment-0001.bin 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kstars-devel/attachments/20080129/cf5eb6db/attachment.pgp