Thanks to the efforts of Henry de Valenc…
Thanks to the efforts of Henry de Valence this summer, KStars can now use OpenGL to render the sky map much faster than before on good graphics hardware. Today, after many mistakes, the merger finally succeeded and trunk now has OpenGL support.
A lot of functionality is still broken in the OpenGL version, and we hope we can fix it before KDE SC 4.6 is tagged. If you have any development skill, or experience fiddling around with Qt’s OpenGL framework and have some time to spare, this is a good time to help us out. Also, bug reports will be appreciated a lot.
OpenGL now opens up a lot of possibilities — realistic atmospheric effects, texture-mapped milky way, cool overlayed guides and information…
But there’s something that I’ve been thinking a bit about these days — should KStars continue? I wonder if a lot of people actually use KStars. The one reason I like KStars is that although it’s not flashy and graphically appealing or very beginner-friendly, I think it does a very good job of catering to the keen armchair astronomer or educator. It has tools that popular software like Stellarium probably don’t have. At the same time, there are better software which work very well for the advanced amateur astronomer like Skychart, that may be difficult to use and not at all flashy, but do an amazing job. With Stellarium being such a popular, and awesome program (I really like a lot of things about Stellarium. We’ve frequently picked up ideas from Stellarium etc.), I wonder if there really is reason to further the development of KStars. I’m not the maintainer, so I really have no right to comment, but these are just my thoughts. Other astronomy software seem to have a good deal of developer power, that they are using to dash ahead, while KStars hasn’t accrued a lot of features in the recent past. Enough lamentation, there are some things that KStars does really well. I really like the outcome of last year’s GSoC by Prakash Mohan — the Observation Planner. I think we have one of the better open source observation planners around. I got an opportunity to actually use it on the field once, and while I still find a lot of scope for improvement, I think it’s one of the best tools I’ve ever used.
TheBlackCat, 
Blendiac, and 4 others are discussing. 
exp(-iHt / hbar)|0> 
riccardo 5:09 pm on October 17, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Actually I don’t own any telescope or stuff like that, so I really am not the kind of user who can judge kstar as an observation tool. Nonetheless I love kstars because it’s an easy to use informational/educational tool, I use it very often during summertime, and even in rest of the year I launch it at lease once a week.
I’m evaluating the chance to purchase an entry level telescope next summer, and I’m already taking a look at what the market offers, basing my choice on hardware supported by kstars, maybe it’s not the best way for choosing it, but kstars has been my successful way for exploring the sky on pc for too long a time, for even thinking quitting it because it’s not the absolute best.
Thank you very much to you and all other kstars developers, and please don’t stop working on it! 🙂
Bogdan 5:38 pm on October 17, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
You have no idea. 🙂 Stellarium’s main point is being shiny. For some time, it was sponsored by a company that used it in planetarium projectors an as a result, the desktop features suffered. There is room for a lot of improvement, but it still is a “star show”, not a “star chart” program.
Skychart/Cartes du Ciel is a “sky chart” program that can cater better to amateur astronomers, but as you said, it is more powerful, but less user friendly. Being powerful, but user-friendly is a niche that KStars can strive to occupy. 🙂
I hope you don’t put Stellarium in that category. We are a handful of people – the lead developer was the only constant, most others seem to appear/disappear sporadically. I’ve been rather active recently, but that’s because I had too much free time (and that’s going to change soon).
David Boddie 5:40 pm on October 17, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I use KStars every once in a while to check what I’m seeing in the night sky at various times. I think it could be a very useful learning tool in an educational setting as a starting point for teaching concepts in astronomy. Do you know if it is used in schools anywhere?
Mark Sumter 8:39 pm on October 17, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I use both Stellarium (with Xfce on an older laptop) and KStars (on my primary laptop). Both programs have niches they each fill nicely in a true ecosphere of choice, which is what floss is all about. After all, you never know where or when feature cross-pollination occurs or what program might inspire some new programmer to try their hand at an ongoing large project.
TheBlackCat 9:08 pm on October 17, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’m not an astronomer myself, but I do like to check on the location of particular stars or planets periodically (the latter more often), so I would definitely not want to see kstars disappear.
One issue, I think, is cross-platform capabilities. Although KDE ostensibly runs on windows, it really isn’t in a state where I could recommend any KDE app to anyone. I am not familiar with the Mac port, but last I heard there was very little happening with it. Once proper cross-desktop support, at least for windows, has been available for a while I think we will be in a better position to judge how kstars stacks up to the competition. But in the meantime I don’t think such comparisons are valid.
Blendiac 1:42 am on October 18, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’m not into any kind of astronomy whatsoever, but I’m all for anything that helps make education visual and interactive. I hear people working in schools using Kstars as a good showpiece for KDE Edu and KDE itself, which sounds like value to me.
TheBlackCat 3:38 am on October 18, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply
It might also be worth posting the same question to the kde-science mailing list, since at least in theory there should be more people interested in science there.
Akarsh Simha 5:07 pm on January 2, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Well, I must say I regret about being skeptical about KStars. I just figured that most people tend to mix and use astronomy software, each best for its own use case. And I didn’t know Stellarium shares our state as far as development is concerned. I hope I can submit some patches there too.
In any case, my next post is a lot more optimistic.