[Kstars-devel] [PATCH] Support of non-western constellations

[James Bowlin]

On Wed October 15 2008, you wrote:
> This might be a good idea. I've added a HD field to every StarObject
> that could be retrieved using StarObject::getHDIndex(). We could base
> the "matching" for stars on that rather than Bayer
> designation. There's a StarComponent::findByHDIndex() for this.
> Unlike earlier, this will require no change in the catalogs :).
> Besides, the startup might become faster because we are doing number
> matching rather than string matching.
>
> I still haven't looked at the patch and will do so this weekend.

Akarsh,

Originally we looked up each Bayer name by combing through all the stars 
over and over again which was breathtakingly slow, so I created a hash 
of Bayer names that was just used for initializing the constellations.  
Perhaps we would want to play the same trick with the HD index and 
create a hash keyed on the HD index for the first 50,000 stars.  We 
could even bail out early by hard coding the dimmest constellation star 
and stop creating the hash once that star is reached which would save 
some space.


-- 
Peace, James