[Kstars-devel] Wrong Epoch in Star Data (Re: KStars for astrophotography)

[Akarsh Simha]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 05:05:37PM +0200, Massimiliano Masserelli wrote:
> Il 23/10/2012 16:53, Bruce Harding ha scritto:
> >These look like great idea's.  More than 50% of the amateur astronomers I know
> >are in to astrophotography or astro-videography.
> 
> May I insist on the problem of wrong coordinates for principal
> stars? I think that this fact alone seriously impacts on using
> kstars as a photography/photometry tool...

Oh yes.

I'm very sorry I didn't follow up on this matter earlier. Your list
mail, if I note correctly, asked for what stars to test.

It already helps that you know that stars.dat has problems.

So there are three star catalogs merged together in KStars:
1. Some bright star catalog I don't know about -- possibly, Hipparchus
2. Tycho-2
3. USNO NOMAD's brightest 100 million.

So stars down to about 8th magnitude come from the 1st catalog, stars
down to 12th magnitude from Tycho-2 and stars down to 16th mag from
USNO NOMAD.

The latter 2 catalogs are add-ons.

Now, the following tests will help me:

1. Stars from which catalogs have the problem? (all 3? only the bright
stars?)

2. Could you name some stars that have the problem? (or give me their
RA / Dec, so I can find them as well)

3. Are all stars from a given catalog affected?

4. Do you have any free GPL-licensable replacement catalogs (you
mention something about libnova)

Hopefully, only the brightest stars are affected, and that should be
easy to fix!

Regards
Akarsh