[Kstars-devel] Fwd: [kde-edu]: GSoC ideas

[Yiannis Belias]

Hi all,
  As a kstars user, let me comment on some GSoC ideas :)

o Project: Community Integration for KStars.
That sounds interesting, but what I would really like to see is updating
on objects lists, like newly found comets, or asteroids.
I'm not sure if we could use horizons[0] for this.
I have never used the capability of creating observations lists, but that
could be used to create and share e.g. astronomical almanacs for important
events throughout the year. [Or maybe even astronomical alerts on khotnewstuff]

o Support for scripting.
Being able to use scripting to control most of what kstars could do would be really great.
  Also, there are cases were scripting could be useful on some text field inputs, too.
Like "2*moon.angular.diameter" in the "Field of view" input text. Or when calculating the
angular distance, From: "moon.center.date('yesterday')" To: "moon.center.date('tomorrow')".
I'm sending a reply to Alexey's mail for more on that.

o Embed images on the skymap.
Really nice that Jérôme is working on that!
There are many times I needed this feature and it hasn't been fun trying to
match one of my images with the plotted star map. So, to the wishlist:
(a) Embed a fits image on the sky view using it's header coordinates with
overlayed symbols. (what Jérôme does now I suppose)
(b1) Embed a (fits/jpeg/tiff/...) image with unknown coordinates and allow the user
to manually pan/zoom/rotate/change alpha/ easily, untill it matches the stars.
Then save to fits with proper coordinates header.
(b2) Solve for astrometry ... Then save to fits with proper coordinates header.
(c) Have you seen this project?[1] It's GPL and is supposed to solve for astrometry
on any image(scale/rotation/exposure) automatically, without providing any initial celestial
positions. If someone could integrate it with kstars, you could just open the random image
you took last night and kstars would open it embedded on the sky map! It's still in alpha
though, and (currently) you need to contact them to send you the index-data files.

Cheers!
Yiannis

[0] http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons
[1] http://astrometry.net/

--
Yiannis Belias  <jonnyb at hol.gr>                    `
Homepage [http://users.hol.gr/~jonnyb/video] '              .
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