[Kstars-devel] Google SoC

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi Alex

> I was wondering about the ideas Jason had posted for kstars to be worked  
> on in the Google Summer of Code, and what might be involved with one or  
> more of them (depending on time of course). Please, let me know if there  
> are any more details about this, or suggestions on writing a proposal,  
> as I think this (KStars: Millions of stars) would be an excellent  
> project for me. I'm a computer science and physics students at my  
> university. Just wondering about the status.

While Jason takes his time to respond (he's a bit busy nowadays), I'll
try to answer your question to whatever extent possible, with my
limited knowledge of what's going on here.

If you take a look at other software like Cartes du Ciel (for Windows
- http://www.stargazing.net/astropc), they display fainter stars only
when we zoom in. This way, they'll be painting fewer stars at all zoom
depths, so they do things faster. In fact, Cartes du Ciel can handle
stars down to 12th magnitude very fast. One of the objectives is to
implement the same in KStars.

The code that paints only stars in the field of view when zoomed in
has already been implemented during the KDE4 port (i.e. spatial
indexing). However, I don't think we load those stars dynamically into
memory from the data files. This makes KStars use a whole lot of
memory and makes the startup very slow. That's one of the objectives.

Again, such dynamic loading, while it is implemented for the "global"
limiting magnitude (set in the options dialog), could be implemented
for the zoom-based magnitude limit.

These should help KStars handle stars down to 12th magnitude.

Once you've done this, you could probably extend it over to deep-sky
objects and asteroids also, but you must take into account the fact
that asteroids vary in magnitude.

I'm not sure if what I've said is right, so this is just to give you a
vague picture till Jason gets back to you.

BTW, I'm also a GSoC aspirant, and am planning to work on KStars as
well. I'm doing a BTech in Engineering Physics, and am in my second
year now.

Regards
Akarsh.