[Kstars-devel] "What's Interesting...": New feature on master branch

[Samikshan Bairagya]

Hello everyone,

I'm excited to inform that after a long time spent on polishing and
bug fixing, I finally merged the gsoc2012-samxan branch to master.
A new feature called "What's Interesting..." has been introduced to
KStars, which aims to suggest "interesting" sky-objects for viewing,
while taking into account the night-sky conditions (how light-polluted
the night-sky is) and availability or unavailability of equipments.

On clicking the What's Interesting... (hereafter termed as WI) option
under the Tools menu, the WI settings dialog comes up which allows
the user to rate the night-sky (see Bortle Dark-Sky
Scale<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_Dark-Sky_Scale>) and to
provide eqipment specifications if available.

After the above mentioned configurations are made, the main QML
interface appears as a QDockWidget to the right side of the skymap.
The QML UI consists of the sky-object *category selection view*,
where the user can choose from different sky-object categories
like Planets, Stars, Galaxies, etc. On choosing any such category,
the list of "interesting" sky-objects of that category is displayed
in the *sky-object list view*. Selecting any sky-object item from
this list opens the *sky-object details-view*. The details-view
displays the following details for each sky-object:

   1. Name of the sky-object.
   2. Approximate position where the sky-object is visible.
   3. Surface brightness.
   4. Magnitude
   5. Size
   6. Information about the object (Information taken from wikipedia.
   Available only for Planets for now)
   7. Option to slew the skymap to the sky-object.
   8. Option to view more details.

The transitions between these three different views are smooth and
not bad to look at. Options to reload the list of interesting sky-objects
and to open the WI settings dialog from the QML UI are available
in the sky-object category selection view.

Please try out this new feature and provide feedback.

Regards,
-- 
Samikshan Bairagya
(Freenode IRC nick: samxan)
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