6.1. | What is the KStars Icon? |
The KStars Icon is a sextant, a handheld telescope which was used by navigators on sailing ships back when the stars were important for navigation. By carefully reckoning the positions of the stars, the navigator could get an accurate estimate of the ship's current longitude and latitude. | |
6.2. | What do the different symbols for Deep-sky objects mean? |
The symbol indicates the object type:
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6.3. | What do the different colors of Deep-sky objects mean? |
Mostly, the different colors indicate which catalog the object belongs with (Messier, NGC or IC). However, some objects have a different color (the default is red). This indicates that there are extra images available in the right click popup menu. | |
6.4. | Why are there so many more U.S. cities than in other countries? Is it a conspiracy? |
It may be a conspiracy, but KStars is not involved! We were unable to find a single longitude/latitude database that covers the globe equitably. We are currently working on adding many more non-U.S. cities to the database. We have already received city lists from users in Norway, Italy and Korea. If you can contribute to this effort, please let us know. | |
6.5. | Why can't I display the ground when using Equatorial Coordinates |
The short answer is, this is a temporary limitation. There is a problem when constructing the filled polygon that represents the ground when in Equatorial mode. However, it doesn't make too much sense to draw the ground in equatorial coordinates, which is why this fix has been given a low priority. | |
6.6. | Why do the faint stars and non-Messier deep sky objects disappear when I am scrolling the display? |
When you update the display's central position, KStars must recompute the pixel coordinates of every object in its database, which involves some pretty heavy trigonometry. When scrolling the display (either with the arrow keys or by dragging with the mouse), the display becomes slow and jerky, because the computer is having trouble keeping up. By excluding many of the objects, the computational load is greatly reduced, which allows for smoother scrolling. You can turn off this feature in the View Options window, or even customize which objects get hidden. | |
6.7. | I don't understand all the terms used in KStars. Where can I learn more about the astronomy behind the program? |
We have started the AstroInfo project to address this problem. AstroInfo is the beginning of an interactive encyclopedia of astronomy for which KStars will be the user interface and demo engine. Right now, it's just a collection of Docbook pages on various astronomy-related topics, with a particular focus on the terms that KStars uses. These articles are presented elsewhere in this document. AstroInfo is supposed to be a community effort, like GNUpedia or Everything2. If you'd like to contribute to AstroInfo, please join our mailing list: kstars-info@lists.sourceforge.net. | |
6.8. | How accurate is KStars? |
KStars is pretty accurate, but it is not (yet) as accurate as it can possibly be. The problem with high-precision calculations is that you start having to deal with a large number of complicating factors. If you aren't a professional astronomer, you'll probably never have a problem with its accuracy. There are two occasions where it may be noticeable: eclipses, and rise/set times. As discussed below, the position of the Moon is extremely hard to predict with high precision, so you probably cannot use KStars to predict eclipses at this time. Here is a list of some of the factors we have not yet corrected for:
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6.9. | Can I help contribute to future versions of KStars? |
Yes, definitely! Introduce yourself on our mailing list: <kstars-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>. If you want to help with the coding, you may want to look over the To-Do list on the webpage for some ideas of what's needed, and talk to current developers about what we're working on. If you aren't into coding, we can still use your help with i18n, docs, AstroInfo articles, bug reports, and feature requests. |