[Kstars-devel] New Version of Steinicke NGC/IC catalog

[Akarsh Simha]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 01:26:26PM -0800, rkline1963 wrote:
> This is very encouraging since it appears that Steinicke has done a lot of
> work to resolve errors in the published NGC data from my reading of his web
> pages.  I am hoping this will help for things like for M2 and M53 having
> magnitude 99.9 in Kstars (I just submitted a bug report.)  NGC2024 also has
> magnitude 99.9 but Steinicke does not give visual magnitude data for it and
> that may be the no data or error response of whatever ingested the data to
> create the databases in Kstars.  I use Kstars in conjunction with star
> charts for most of my observing.

Actually, I ran into the same bugs a few days ago while trying to
prepare star charts. the reason why M2 and M53 (and most globular
clusters) have undefined magnitudes is because we honour only the Blue
Magnitude in KStars, and Dr. Steinicke's catalog (even the revised
one) does not have blue magnitudes for globular clusters, amongst
other objects.

So I am currently "make-do-ing" with a modified, old, Steinicke
catalog, that has visual magnitudes from the revised Steinicke catalog
for all objects, and blue magnitudes wherever the visual ones are
unavailable in the revised Steinicke catalog. I can send you a copy if
you wish, but I don't want to circulate it in public right now because
it is not clear which magnitudes are which.

The right way to solve this problem is to have KStars support both B
and V, and possibly a multitude of other magnitudes, which it
currently does. We need a function call on SkyObject that guesses a
sensible visual / blue magnitude for internal purposes (like for
sorting, imposing magnitude limits, etc.), but that magnitude should
never be shown to the user.

Any suggestions from others?

Regards
Akarsh