[Kstars-devel] Google SoC

[Brian]

Hi,
I ran the proper motion problem past a person who should know and got
this response.

"Proper motions are small. I would calculate proper motion
corrected positions and re-index the star catalog each time a
new K-stars release was made, which I am certain is often
enough."

I agree with Akarsh the limiting magnitude is more of a problem.
e.g. Proxima Centauri our nearest neighbour is not in the catalogue as
it is a Mag 11 star, just outside the limit.
When zooming in we  should be able to go a lot lower than the current
mag of 10.

As a rough guide most reasonable telescope/ccd combinations can get down
to mag 16, it would be good if kstars could do the same.

I appreciate that kstars does take a little while to load, but in the
scheme of things it is not a limiting factor. It takes my ccd 30mins to
cool down:)

Hope this helps.

Brian
http://astronomicalresearchaustralia.org



Akarsh Simha wrote:
> Hi James,
> 
> WOW! The HTM implementation seems to have been a big challenge ^:-)^
> 
> How significant is proper motion? Will it affect significantly for
> time steps of one year? This can be a real challenge if we want
> to load from the disk, as you said. Maybe we could load some of the
> very high proper motion stars at initialization itself, so that we
> needn't bother about them for a 50,000 year interval?
> 
> I think the magnitude problem is easier. Maybe we can permit some data
> redundancy and have flat files till about magnitude 5 or 6, for the
> unzoomed picture, or maybe have stars to magnitude 6 pre-loaded during
> initialization. That way, we will load from the disk only the faint
> stars when we zoom in. That, I suppose, will greatly reduce the number
> of disk seeks when we zoom out.
> 
> Please pardon me if I have blurted out something without understanding
> things. I need to go back and look at the htmesh source code sometime
> and understand these things.
> 
> Regards
> Akarsh.
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