[Kstars-devel] Errors in StarBlockFactory / StarBlockList

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi

I keep getting this and other similar output on the terminal:

kstars(30667) StarBlockFactory::markNext: WARNING: Marking block with faint mag =  12.79  after block with faint mag  15.26 in trixel 32606

This is something very bad, because if this is real, then half the
stars are not going to be drawn. Looking through the code, I can't
tell why this is happening. I ran a check on my catalog for incorrect
magnitude order, but the tester (data/tools/nomadbinfiletester)
reported no errors.

This was very likely introduced after Akademy 2008 (August 2008),
because I'm almost certain that I weeded out most of the bugs before
that, and something like this would have almost certainly caught my
attention. However, these bugs are also hard to find because they
could happen only for specific regions of the sky. In this case, the
output on my terminal shows this happening for trixels 32606 and 32607
which seem to lie around M 34 in Perseus.

Alexey introduced some changes in this code, but looking through them,
I don't see anything that can cause this. The StarBlock constructor
sets the faintmag of StarBlocks to -5.

If anyone has some ideas, I'd appreciate them. I'll probably give it a
bit of my time today.

Also, if all goes well, I'm going to be at the Texas Star Party this
weekend. I'm trying to use the Observation Planner feature in KStars,
both because it's very convenient (I've tried it before on the
field). There are several bugs / usability issues, though, and I'm
trying to fix some of them in the interest of improving KStars and
making my observation sessions smoother at the same time. :). I'll let
you know how the "field test of KStars" goes ;-)

Regards
Akarsh