[Kstars-devel] Google SoC

[Alex Brandt]

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Akarsh Simha wrote:
| Hi Alex
| 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.
| _______________________________________________
| Kstars-devel mailing list
| Kstars-devel at kde.org
| https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kstars-devel
That all sounds correct, and as I mentioned to Jason I'm currently a 
fourth year student working towards my B.S. in computer science and 
physics. I deal with astronomers on a daily basis, and this project 
caught my eye because of that. I'd like to submit an application for 
this project, but I'm not really sure what to include, or how to break 
it down. If anyone has any suggestions I'd really appreciate hearing them.

Thanks,

Alex Brandt

- --
Student, B.S. Physics & Computer Science
Department of Physics and Astronomy, MSUM
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, MSUM
www.alunduil.com
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