[Kstars-devel] Minor patches and a few clarifications

[Jason Harris]

Hi Akarsh,

On 1/29/08, Akarsh Simha <akarshsimha at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just managed to get the KDE development setup on my computer. KStars looks good!
>
Welcome to KStars 1.3 :)

> 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?
>
I've intentionally oversaturate the colors to make them more obvious.
You can turn down the saturation easily in the Colors tab of the
Configuration window.  I think for the default we should leave the
saturated colors, but I'm open for further discussion on this.  Maybe
we could add another color scheme that attempts to be more realistic
than Moonless Night?


>   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!

Yes, this is a problem.

> What database are we using for comets?

We are using the files published by NASA at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?sb_elem
Their comets file does not include G or H parameters.

>Can we use one of the IAU-MPC standard databases? Will there be
license-compatibility issues?

Yes, we can certainly switch to the MPC elements as published here:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Comets/SoftwareComets.html

However, the MPC files only include about 200 comets, whereas we now
have about 1200.  Do you know of a more extensive list of orbital
elements from MPC?

> 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.

That would be great.

>
> 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.

No problem, I will apply the patch as soon as I can.  I just checked
the Steinicke NGC/IC catalog, which can be downloaded with the Get New
Stuff tool.  It correctly identifies NGC 1975 as a nebula, but also
misidentifies NGC 1977 as a cluster.  What should we do about this?  I
am a bit reluctant to modify Mr. Steinicke's catalog.  Maybe I can
just let him know that we are correcting this object't type.

>
> 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.

Great, I'll apply this one as well.

Thanks for your contributions, I'm really excited to see so much
activity around KStars these past weeks :)

regards,
Jason

>
> --
> Akarsh Simha
>
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