KStars v3.5.9 Released

KStars v3.5.9 is released on 2022.05.26 for MacOS, Linux, and Windows. It's a bi-monthly bugfix release with a couple of exciting features.

DSS Offline HiPS

HiPS (Hierarchical Progressive Surveys) is a technology that provides progressive high resolution images of the sky at different zoom levels. KStars fully supports online HiPS where data is downloaded from online servers and cached to display on the Sky Map.

One of the most popular catalogs in KStars is the DSS Colored progressive survey. With v3.5.9, you can now specify directory where the offline DSS catalog is located. You can download the data from various HiPS services online. For best experience, it's recommended to download 3rd, 4th, and 5th (Norder3, Norder4, and Norder5) order directories which would take around 1GB of storage space. You may download further orders (i.e. higher zoom levels) at the expense of more storage space.

The following shows a sample of downloaded order directories, at minimum you need Norder3 folder for this functionality to work.

Revamped Mosaic Planner

New simplified and powerful Mosaic Planner directly integrated in the Sky Map. It greatly benefits from HiPS overlay to make your target framing spot on. Toggle the Mosaic View from the tool bar, and select your equipment and the mosaic configuration. You can also use it as a very simple tool to frame a single 1x1 tile.

Adjust the tile center either by manually specifying the J2000 center or by dragging the tiles across the sky map. Once done, you can command the mount to go to the target and solve. Alternatively, you can proceed to create jobs for the Ekos Scheduler. After the jobs are added, you may start the scheduler at any time to plan the mosaic session accordingly.

Refocus After Meridian Flip

Dušan Poizl added the ability to refocus after a meridian flip is complete. This is very useful for some optical train setups where the focuser might shift duration the flip.

New Index Files

Robert Lancaster added the new 5200 astrometry index files. The difference is just which star surveys were used to build which indexes. The 4200 Series was made from 2MASS and covers all the image scales. The 4100 series was made from Tycho2 but only covers wide image scales. The 5200 series was just recently added, was made by blending Tycho2 and Gaia, and complements the 4100 series to give it the smaller scales.

Internal Plumbing: Introducing Device Adapter

Wolfgang Reissenberger continues his outstanding work refactoring Ekos state machine by introducing the device adapter. Next step extracting state handling from Capture into a dedicated state machine. In this step devices are managed by a dedicated device adapter (successor of the command processor). With this refactoring it is no longer necessary to route device events from Capture through SequenceJob to the state machine, the device adapter sends the events directly to the state machine.

Capture Progress face lift

Wolfgang Reissenberger streamlined the capture progress section of Capture:

• 
  Remaining time for frame and sequence displayed as hh:mm:ss
• Display of average download time (in calculation, all download times are taken into account and not only those > 1)
• New status widget with a color LED displaying the capture status (and no longer using the seconds text for this)
• Using the same widget on the Master tab 
  

Greedy Scheduler Speeds up

Fans of Greedy Scheduler rejoice! Hy Murveit made significant speedups to the Greedy Scheduler, especially for very large scheduler. 

Hundreds of visual surveys in KStars!

With the KStars "Hipster" 2.8.1 release, I introduced Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS) in KStars with three sample catalogs in the optical, infrared, and gamma regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Now users can browse from hundreds of online HiPS surveys and can enable them for overlay in KStars. Everything from radio, infrared, optical up to gamma rays is available along with a short description on each survey of interest.

Since these surveys literally take hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, they are downloaded on-demand and stored in a local cache. The disk cache is set by default to consume 1 GB while the RAM cache is set to 300 MB. These settings are now configurable from the HiPS Settings to provide users the flexibility to balance system resources with catalog usage.

By default, overlays utilize nearest neighbor algorithm to map 2D images unto the celestial sphere. Drawing of HiPS overlays can be further improved by enabling Bilinear Interpolation at the expense of increased CPU usage.

These selections shall be available in the next KStars 2.8.2 release coming up soon.

KStars 2.8.1 "Hipster" Release is out!

It finally landed! KStars 2.8.1 aka Hipster release is out for Windows & MacOS!

The highlight for this release is experimental support for HiPS: Hierarchical Progressive Surveys. HiPS provides multi-resolution progressive surveys to be overlayed directly in client applications, such as KStars. It provides an immersive experience as you can explore the night sky dynamically.

With over 200+ surveys across the whole electromagnetic spectrum from radio, infrared, visual, to even gamma rays, the user can pan and zoom progressively deeper into the data visually.

HiPS Support in KStars

HiPS support in KStars has been made possible with collaboration with the excellent open source planetarium software SkyTechX. This truely demonstrates the power of open source to accelerate development and access to more users.

Another feature, also imported from SkyTechX, is the Polaris Hour Angle, which is useful for users looking to polar align their mount.

Polar Hour Angle

GSoC 2017 student Csaba Kertész continued to merge many code improvements. Moreover, many bugs fixes landed in this release. The following are some of the notable fixes and improvements:

• BUGS:382721 Just use less than and greater than keys for time.
• BUGS:357671 Patch by Robert Barlow to support custom catalogs in WUT.
• Improved comet and asteroid position accuracy.
• Ekos shall fallback to user defined scopes if INDI driver does not provide scope metadata.
• Fixed command line parsing.
• Fixed many PHD2 external guider issues.
• Fixed selection of external guiders in Ekos Equipment Profile.
• Fixed rotator device infinite loop.
• Fixed scheduler shutdown behavior.
• Fixed Ekos Mosaic Position Angle.
• Fixed issue with resetting Polar Alignment Assistant Tool rotation state.
• Fixed issue with Ekos Focus star selection timeout behavior.
• Ekos always switches to CLIENT mode when taking previews.
• Handle proper removal of devices in case of Multiple-Devices-Per-Driver drivers
• Display INDI universal messages for proper error reporting.
• Better logging with QLoggingCategory.

Ekos Mosaic Tool with HiPS