[Kstars-devel] What's new in KStars 1.5!

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi Brian,

> May I suggest an update.
> You have a oneliner to say that indi has been removed from kstars.
> I have already had one request to ask how to start/use indi.
> As I do not have 4.2 yet I cannot check on the doco, which I assume has  
> been updated to reflect the change.
> So on your what's new page could you refer to a chapter/url that will  
> enable a new user to get started.

Jasem Mutlaq is the maintainer for INDI and he could tell you how to
get it to work.

A bit of googling tells me that there are RPMs for Mandriva and
OpenSuSE at the moment (as Jasem mentioned earlier here, IIRC). Maybe
you could check it out from here:

http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=90275

and build from sources for other distros. I don't use INDI, so I
really don't know.

> You also mention the ability to load the usno nomad catalogue(yes I
> do have an observatory), so as soon as I get 4.2 I will install it.
> I have here the 12 CD USNO 'A1' catalogue.  Would it be possible to
> load from that or do you do a conversion process?

If I recall correctly, USNO A does not have proper motion data,
whereas KStars needs the (first order) rates of proper motion to
account for proper motion. That's why we discarded that in my
GSoC. Besides, the format and placement of data didn't fit into the
scheme we had in mind. 

I think that it is a good idea to support USNO A. Maybe I should add
support for that, and it will have to wait till KDE 4.3

But till then, I believe it should be possible to write a program to
convert USNO A into the format in which KStars wants the stuff and
then fool KStars into thinking that USNO A is actually the 100e8 star
catalog from USNO NOMAD. That way, you could get it to work with the
current version as well. And if you do write a program at some point
of time, please do share it :)

Regards
Akarsh