[Kstars-devel] My vision for Prakash's GSoC project

[Akarsh Simha]

> Right, I think point 1 will be within my GSoC, will do that. Point
> two, I dunno how easy/difficult it is to cache images and load them,
> if its not too much work I can probably do that too.

I don't think it's hard to get a image cache working. Should be
possible within your GSoC, but you could treat that as an auxilliary
aim, IMO.

> >   - If community integration is done, cache community observing logs
> >     for those targets
>
> Not in my immediate plans. Maybe a good Season of KDE project.

Of course. That's not for you :)

> > 2. A log to record observations made that night
> >   - We must open an 'observing session' that has info about
> >       + Location Details
> >       + Weather, Sky Condition (Transparency, Seeing, Humidity...)
> >       + Equipment (Telescopes, Eyepieces, Filters...)
> >     [COMAST provides ways to log all this beautifully]
> >   - We should have places to input observation logs about all
> >     planned targets
>
> Right, now Implementation of XML schema might be too hard for me, I'll
> see if I can work on this. Plus this XML scheme is not Qt-XML
> compatible right ?

I'll do some research and tell you what's the machinery we have in Qt
to do this. Would help if someone on the ML knew that already.

> >   - Normally, one ends up having some unplanned targets. So we need
> >     the ability to add unplanned objects on the fly and store logs
> >     about them as well
> 
> That's simple, you can add stuff to OL from anywhere :)

Okay. That makes sense.

> > 3. A nice integrated UI to plan your observing session
> >   - One might like to have an "overall" observing wishlist of all
> >     objects one is interested in observing, out of which, one selects
> >     some objects for tonight.
>
> Not difficult to implement. But how necessary is this ? This calls in
> for a lot of new things to come.
> 1. the User has to Add a list of "Favourite" objects.
> 2. FindDialog should have a "Favourite" objects in the filter by type,
> so the user can pick from this.
> 3. We have to integrate the "Favoutite" objects in What's up tonight.
> Thats essentially what the user is interested in I guess.
> But IMO these are very useful things to have.

3 is not really required immediately. But 2 and 1 seem good.

> >        + Sky Calendar tool [?]
> 
> Er, Akarsh, I'm waiting for your reports on this.

I still need to think about this. Any suggestions are welcome.

> >        + Ability to automatically "suggest" an observing list for the
> >          night [Far fetched?]
> 
> Isnt it what the WUT does ? We need to improve the WUT by adding
> filter by magnitude. Plus that bit about "Favourite" objects, this
> feature will be _Really_ useful. Can someone implement the filter by
> magnitude in WUT Dialog ?

Exactly. Filter by magnitude should be enough, in principle.

> Lol. Not very simple. Or atleast I'm not aware of how to do this.

The point of GSoC is that we learn ;-) Will try to research on
KOrganizer so that I can help you - but that's for a later stage.

> > In addition to these, it would be nice if KStars would offer to
> > schedule observing sessions for astronomical events. For instance, if
> > the conjunctions tool found an interesting conjunction, I should be
> > able to schedule an observing session for that conjunction from within
> > KStars.
> 
> Right, not a simple thing to do. This calls for KStars to run a lot of
> tools on start and add a lot of objects to the OL. Not really a good
> idea IMO.

Eh?

Regards
Akarsh