[Kstars-devel] KStars and Archaeoastronomy

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi Chris

> My name is Chris Papanikolaou and I live in Athens, Greece. I study
> Archaeoastronomy in the University of Aegean, Rhodes. I need your help to
> this problem: When I find a declination (?) of a monument I need to know
> the exactly stars that passing this declination in the past (from 1BC to
> 4713 BC). I have a software of the University (Stars) but it refer only 143
> stars and some of them is out of range for the Greek sky (some southern
> stars). I need also stars not over 6 magnitude (visual range). Is it
> possible to create a Script or something like this and give me the KStars a
> table of stars for the past to specific declination?
>
> Thank you in advance for your time and your help!

I'm afraid that KStars might not be able to do that in a  
straightforward manner. You could get a sky map pretty easily, but a  
list of stars is harder.

But here's a way to do it (that doesn't really involve KStars, though)  
-- look jat kstars/kstars/data/stars.dat in the sources. This file  is  
the old bright stars catalog in plain-text format. If you see under  
kstars/kstars/data/tools, there is a perl script called  
hipdatatomysql.pl. This script will put the data into a MySQL  
database. (You should have MySQL server installed and running etc.)

You can then do whatever you want with that data. The next step, IMO,  
would be to write a script to create another version of the data with  
the 1 BC and 4713 BC equatorial coordinates (i.e. apply precession,  
nutation and proper motion. Precession and nutation are simple  
rotations, whereas proper motion is applied as motion of known speed  
along a given great circle on the sky. You can see an example of  
proper motion in kstars/kstars/data/tools/nomaddatatomysql.pl). Then  
you could ask the MySQL server to give you a list of stars.

However, beware that there is a known problem with KStars' star  
catalogs. Depending on the accuracy that you seek, this might be a  
problem. I think our stars.dat had a mix of two epochs, but I think  
that has been fixed (although the bug mentioned in the following  
e-mail has not been). See this email for details:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kstars-devel&m=136370727322021

I'm sorry that KStars doesn't provide a canned solution to your  
problem. I don't expect other planetarium software to implement this  
either.

Regards
Akarsh