[Kstars-devel] Star-hopping feature

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi

I'm just very excited about something new that I just got working, so
I thought I'd shout it out on the list! This code is still far from
mergeable into trunk and has a lot of "dirty hacks" that need to be
cleaned up before it can go in. It also needs a lot of improvement to
be actually usable, but here's what it is:

http://imagebin.ca/view/z4TAurmX.html

That's an A* search algorithm trying to get you from mu Andromedae
(star at the bottom) to Andromeda Galaxy (big red ellipse), with an
FOV of 1 degree (dark blue circle) on your telescope. You can see that
it is still missing the last hop, but notice how it chooses bright
stars, and also likes tight groupings of stars that are eye-catching.

For those who haven't done much observation with their telescopes,
this is just like Google Maps' navigation feature on the sky!

Both the backends and the frontends need a lot of improvement before I
can shove it into trunk, so I don't know if it will make it into KDE
SC 4.6, but I'm going to try :)

BTW, this will break Harry's merger and cause a compile error. But
I've noted that with a FIXME. It's in
TargetListComponent::drawTargetSymbol(), where we use
SkyMap::checkVisibility etc, but those methods have been moved into a
different class in Harry's branch.

Regards
Akarsh