[Kstars-devel] More star catalog issues

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi Andrew,

> 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.

Jason fixed this bug earlier, but he probably forgot to backport it:

[Quoting from the mailing list, I think this was in April]
SVN commit 795606 by harris:

Fixing bug #123647: Delta Cancri is "Asselus Australis", not "Asselus
Borealis"

> 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.

While I don't know much about our star data, our default NGC/IC
catalog is horribly buggy. This is because all the 'good' NGC/IC
catalogs are not compliant with GPL. So if you do find any mistakes in
magnitudes, as compared to Wikipedia and other reliable sources, do
let us know.

Regards
Akarsh
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