[Kstars-devel] User questions: star size on screen and observation log

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi Ron

Thanks for your questions. Those raise a lot of developer-feed, so I
think your post was most welcome here!

> Two questions about the KStars interface (KStars 1.5.3, Ubuntu 9.10):
> 
> 1.  Can I adjust the size of stars represented on the screen?  Even 
> zoomed in, magnitude 7-8 stars render with a single pixel.  It's hard to 
> distinguish them from dust on the screen and from nearby (often far 
> dimmer) deep sky objects.

I don't think we have this setting exposed anywhere. We just use some
heuristics to guess the size we must use to represent the star. But
I'm surprised that this is the case for mag 7 ~ 8 stars even when
zoomed in. It would be nice if you could file a bug report on
bugs.kde.org against KStars. (I wouldn't promise immediate fixing,
though :-S. We lack the kind of developer power that a project like
this requires.)

> 2.  Is there any access to the observation log outside the details 
> dialog for an object?  Or, is ~/.kde/share/apps/kstars/userlog.dat just 
> the place to go?

Yes, there's one more place that I know of, and that's the Observing
List which you can find under the Tools menu. But if you want to play
with that data, userlog.dat is the way to go. Maybe Prakash can
provide some more insight.

But I'd like to phase out that user log and use it for different
purposes eventually. There's this neat format for sharing observing
logs that a German group for Astronomy in Computer Science has come up
with called
OAL. http://groups.google.com/group/openastronomylog. KStars is moving
towards generating OAL compliant observation log reports and much of
the backends are already there in good shape.

> I've played around with KStars for years, but finally used it for the 
> first time during an observing session.  Many thanks to developers and 
> maintainers alike.

> Defining my own field-of-view symbol was a real boon.  Stopping the 
> clock and seeing that it wasn't running the CPU full speed and draining 
> my netbook battery like other planetarium software was a bonus.

Thanks, we really appreciate this pat-on-the-back every now and
then. Makes us feel like continuing to solve these issues.

Please do file bug reports whenever you feel something isn't working
the way it should be. Or if you know C++, we're hiring :)

Regards
Akarsh