[Kstars-devel] More star catalog issues

[Jason Harris]

Hi Andrew,

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Andrew Buck <andrew.buck at ndsu.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>
As Akarsh said, I fixed this already.  I didn't backport it because
AFAIK, there isn't going to be another 3.5.x release (anyone know if
I'm wrong about that?)

> 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.
>
It's a good idea in principle, but wikipedia will only have articles
for at most a few hundred of the brightest stars, so I don't think we
can get a complete catalog from wp.  Our stars catalog is actually
pretty good, it's based on the Hipparcos catalog...but I did the name
association myself, so I think this bug resulted from that process.

As Akarsh said, our NGC/IC catalog is pretty incomplete, so it's
possible that we could use wp to improve this catalog.  Are you
interested in investigating the possibility?

thanks,
Jason

> -Buck
>
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