Sorry Peter, I should have been more clear. I meant running it from the Terminal like this:

/Applications/KStars.app/Contents/MacOS/kstars

Just type that and then hit enter. It will put all the output in the terminal and say whatever error happens more clearly and with more context about what is going on. It should look something like this (assuming it starts to launch and assuming you don't have your output going to a text file):

rlancaste@Orion ~ % /Applications/KStars.app/Contents/MacOS/kstars
Call to writableLocation without an application-based location.
org.kde.kstars: Welcome to KStars 3.6.9 Beta
org.kde.kstars: Build: 2024-01-26T20:43:19Z
org.kde.kstars: OS: "osx"
org.kde.kstars: API: "x86_64-little_endian-lp64"
org.kde.kstars: Arch: "x86_64"
org.kde.kstars: Kernel Type: "darwin"
org.kde.kstars: Kernel Version: "23.2.0"
org.kde.kstars: Qt Version: 5.15.12
Starting DBus

From this information I can see the context of what it tried to do before crashing, which can help to figure out why it crashed.

if it doesn't all load and launch properly, it should look more like this:

/Applications/KStars.app/Contents/MacOS/kstars
dyld[43469]: Library not loaded: @rpath/libcfitsio.4.dylib
Referenced from: <6F725553-BA37-37E9-8FE8-14001FC17C57> /Applications/KStars.app/Contents/MacOS/kstars
Reason: tried: '/Applications/KStars.app/Contents/Frameworks/libcfitsio.4.dylib' (no such file), '/Applications/KStars.app/Contents/MacOS/../Frameworks/libcfitsio.4.dylib' (no such file), '/Applications/KStars.app/Contents/Frameworks/libcfitsio.4.dylib' (no such file), '/Applications/KStars.app/Contents/MacOS/../Frameworks/libcfitsio.4.dylib' (no such file)
zsh: abort /Applications/KStars.app/Contents/MacOS/kstars

If you can see it, from this I can tell that the reason it did not launch was because it couldn't find libcfitsio.4.dylib, which I temporarily removed just to cause the error so you can see what information we would probably need to solve your crash.

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