KStars v3.6.7 is Released

KStars v3.6.7 is released on 2023.10.03 for MacOS & Linux. Windows build is still pending and should hopefully be released by 10th of October. It's a bi-monthly bugfix release with a couple of exciting features.

Image Overlay Component

Hy Murveit introduced a long requested feature: Custom Image Overlays!

With this new feature, a user can add their own processed/completed astro-images, and the system will display them scaled and rotated appropriately on the Sky Map.

The feature is controlled in the KStars Settings menu, in a new tab labelled Image Overlays. First the user needs to add files into a directory, parallel to the logs directory, called imageOverlays. Simply add the images there (typically jpegs). Ideally these aren't massive files for performance reasons, but probably width 1000 or 2000 are fine. I have been testing with larger files, which will also work be use more system resources on slower CPUs.

The user then uses the Image Overlays menu in KStars Settings to (one-time) plate-solve the images and check a box to enable the image display. Successful plate-solve info is stored in the user-db so that it doesn't have to be done again. The images should, from then on, appear in the SkyMap in the proper position. There is a way to easily navigate to the images without manipulating the SkyMap by selecting a row in the overlay table and clicking on the "Show" button. You can move from one image to the next with up/down arrow keyboard commands.

A user can adjust the plate-solve timeouts. As these are mostly blind solves (jpegs won't have any header info, and as currently implemented, no header info is used) the plate solving can be problematic. You can choose a default image scale (arcseconds-per-pixel) or leave that to 0.0 to not use scale. If there are files that won't solve, the user can add RA,DEC into the image's row in the table displayed, which would get the solver to use the sky position as a constraint. The user can also add the scale that way. In fact, if the user knows all the info for the image, he/she can populate all the fields on the image's row and simply set the status field to OK, and plate-solving would no longer be required.

Rotator Dialog Improvements

Toni Schriber continued simplifying the Rotator Dialog. Rotator Flip Policy was introduced. This (global) policy is an answer to this question and to this wish. It's now possible to define how the rotator reacts after a flip or if the result of a solved reference image reports a different pierside respective to the actual mount pierside. Preserve Rotator Angle will keep the rotator position and the camera is virtually rotated by 180°. Preserve Position Angle will keep the camera position angle.

The rotator always turns the camera to the original position angle and the image will show the original star arrangement. Flip Policy can be altered in the StellarSolver Options under Rotator Settings.

More File Placeholders

Due to popular demand, Wolfgang Reissenberger added support for camera temperature %C, gain %G, offset %O and pier side %P.

This is not only applicable to locally captured images, but also for images captured on a remote INDI server.