[Kstars-devel] Binary star data loading accomplished in Branch!

[James Bowlin]

On Sun June 8 2008, Jason Harris wrote:
> > Does a mag 16 limit roughly translate to 10 million stars?
>
> No, 10 million gets us to about 12.5 mag.  16th mag would require
> about 400 million stars.

Thanks Jason!  That many stars would take about 12 Gig of disk space
with our current storage scheme.

I think we could refactor our software to accommodate a catalog of that 
size.  It might be too ambitious to do this summer, but maybe we could 
do it next summer.

I would use 3 different meshes simultaneously:

  A 512 trixel mesh for most things and the first 1E6 stars,
  
  An 8K trixel mesh for the next 20E6 stars and finally,

  A 128K trixel mesh for the final 400E6 stars.

We would have to refactor the code to allow for these multiple meshes.  
It is currently designed so there is only one mesh size at a time.
We would also implement the top level data structure as a hash rather
than a array because we would never populate all of the 128K trixels
simultaneously.


-- 
Peace, James