[Kstars-devel] More star catalog issues

[Andrew Buck]

I was doing some planning to go out observing tonight and I happened to
notice that Kstars shows two different stars in Cancer with the same
name (Asselus Borealis).  I know there are lots of issues with finding a
decent open source catalog of stars so I don't know what can be done
about this but I thought I would pass it along.

Also, I had an idea of possibly using data from Wikipedia as the source
catalog for Kstars.  Almost all of the wiki articles on stars have an
infobox in them which lists name, RA, DEC, etc, for the star articles.
It should be relatively straight forward to create a script to crawl
through and record this data in a database file.  Wikipedia is under the
GFDL so it should be no problem to include the data in Kstars.  As a
bonus we would also have the wiki link to add to the links page on the
object details.  Someone did something similar to this with Google Earth
by parsing geographical coordinates (lat, lon, and population) out of a
similar template.

-Buck