[Kstars-devel] Re: Kstars observtion Field Notes

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi Bruce

> I has asked a month or so ago about at printable field notes page and I said I 
> see what other astronomy programs are doing.  I've just put together a rough 
> outline of what I envision based on what I've see and what Kstars can do.
> 
> The left side has your basic observing field note segements.  I'm aware that 
> they are not align etc...
> 
> The right is side I envision as being generated by kstars from a menu 
> selection made by the user as to what star field FOV's he/she wish to see.  My 
> sample use a basic 22 degree FOV at the top...  My second image is base on the 
> FOV of my finderscope and lastly the FOV of the eye I propose to use on that 
> image.
> 
> Since I'm not sure if the list accepts attachments I've put my sample here.
> http://faintfuzzies.ca/v/hobbies/astro/KSTARS_OBSERVATION_FIELD_NOTES.PNG.html
> 
> I'd love to hear what you think.

Well, I get the idea. It's one more of those nice things that we
should implement. Probably we should also allow the user to print out
his/her own observations (which he/she has already filled into
KStars).

The problem we have is manpower. There are a whole bunch of things
we've been wanting to do. I think the most important of them all, in
my opinion, would be the code architecture fork that I mentioned in an
earlier mail. I wonder if this will happen in the near future.

However, I think this can be done (although a bit slowly) with
scripting support. KStars does have scripting support, although I
don't know of good documentation on it. In principle you should be
able to generate this using a combination of ImageMagick, LaTeX or
some other sort of typesetting language and KStars.

Although I wonder why you'd want to use KStars rather than DSS / SDSS
queries which provide actual images.

It makes a lot of sense to have such a feature in KStars, particularly
if we fix our observation planner and logger.

Regards
Akarsh