Hi
I'm pleased to introduce two new features in KStars that are aimed at kind-of working around the "catalog problem" that we have in KStars. As you know, we havee the Messier, NGC and IC, and a few custom catalogs, but it's frequently frustrating that an object that we want to observe / photograph is not available within KStars.
So I have incorporated two new "workarounds" -- which are really more than workarounds. They are general and powerful compared to installing individual catalogs.
This is motivated by two observations: 1) usually, with the fainter catalogs, we are interested only in a few "well-known" or "interesting" objects. 2) there has already been a lot of effort towards making publicly accessible catalogs -- by the professionals (SIMBAD, NED etc.) and by amateurs (eg: Cartes du Ciel and Stellarium).
Instead of duplicating the excellent work done by Cartes du Ciel and other open-source software, we attempt to provide functionality through inter-operability.
The first workaround is to query SIMBAD/NED/VizieR for unknown objects. This feature is explained in detail in the following video:
The second workaround is to parse text, notably from Cartes du Ciel's "About <object>" dialog, to incorporate objects in KStars. This is done by the following procedure in current git master:
1. Go to the "Data" menu, select "Manually add a deep-sky object" (although it says "deep-sky", it works for stars too)
2. You get a dialog like this:
3. Click the "Guess from Text" button on the bottom left
4. Copy-paste the text that has the description of the object. Make sure to include all relevant fields. In the example below, I'm copying from Cartes du Ciel. But it is designed to parse from a variety of sources, even just e-mails and forum posts such as
this one
seem to work.
5. Check and correct any mistakes. KStars does not yet determine the type and blue magnitude. In this case, it has failed to recognize the name of the object, but has gotten all the other parameters correctly.
(The parsing will be continually improved to try and better results, but there's always cases where it will fail, like shown below)
6. Double check the information, choose the object type, and hit ok. It will save the object into a catalog called _Manual_Additions.
Let us know what you think!
Regards
Akarsh