Functional Sesame resolver in branch dso_resolver

Akarsh Simha akarshsimha at gmail.com
Wed Aug 17 02:46:06 UTC 2016


Hello

I just pushed some code on the branch dso_resolver. I'm sorry for poor
development ethic on this branch (the commit logs, commit messages and
order of patches is not very sanitized) -- hopefully, the actual code
itself is clean.

The way it is set up is that we create a "fake" catalog called "Misc",
that is used internally to store all the resolved objects in the
SQLite database. I couldn't come up with a better solution given the
fact that all our deep-sky machinery is tied to working with catalogs.
The code tries to prevent presenting the internal designation to the
user, but right now it is incomplete and so you do see "Misc 0" or
something like that in some places.

The end result is pretty exciting -- you can type the name of any
object, even one that is not present in KStars' catalogs into the Find
Dialog, and KStars quietly queries the internet for you, puts the
object into the database, and centers on it. Once it is commited to
the catalog, KStars will bring it back up the next time it is run.
Currently, on this branch, the feature is enabled by default and
there's no way to disable it, and I'm going to work on changing that
next. It would also be nice to have something to "purge" all the
downloaded objects and start afresh. This might require more work and
may not be as important. There's also the problem of trying to parse
SIMBAD/NED's object type identification better. Depending on which
engine Sesame queries, you may get a different type identification for
the same object. So lots of TYPE_UNKNOWN objects, which explains my
recent commit of drawing unknown DSOs on the map with a ? symbol.

Check it out give me your feedback!

Regards
Akarsh


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