[Kstars-devel] GSoC 2012: Project Introduction: Logs and Data

[Rishab Arora]

Hello everyone! :)

I'm Rishab, and as Samikshan mentioned, one of the two students accepted
for KStars this year! Needless to say, I'm really excited to work on KStars
this summer :)

I am relatively new to the community, so I'll take a moment to introduce
myself. I'm Rishab Arora (idling on IRC as 'spacetime'), an undergraduate
student of Information Technology from New Delhi, India. Currently in my
third year of college, I take particular interest in handling large amounts
of data. I'm an amateur astronomer and have a habit of naming devices,
heuristics and algorithms (or anything I can name) after heavenly bodies,
so I think I should fit right in. ;)

I'll start with a small description of what I've be aiming for this summer.
My proposal "Improving Data Storage, Logs and adding DSO catalogs to
KStars" involves
a. building a log viewer which will enable users to 'store' observation
logs in an internal database
b. improving the way data files handled, specifically the parsing of text
files. I'll be making it more robust and extensible.
c. storing Deep Sky Objects in a database to solve some problems we're
facing now that KStars is expanding the its datastore
d. Using the new database structure, add catalogs to KStars


Out of these, I feel adding the ability for the user to regularly store and
manage observation logs inside KStars itself would turn out to be quite
useful. Akarsh is my mentor for this project and I'm already getting a
glimpse of all the excitement (and lots of work! ) awaiting me. :) I'll be
blogging about the project and my experiences at blog.rishab.in regularly.
I'll add more details as they are discussed on the blog itself.

Although most of my interaction regarding KStars has been with Samikshan,
Akarsh and Rafal, I've worked with KStar's code so I am only familiar with
the work of other contributors. It would be great if I could get to know
everyone here! :)

Cheers!
Rishab Arora
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