KStars 3.7.2 Released

KStars v3.7.2 is released on 2024.08.03 for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.

A few members of the KStars development team were enjoying their summer holidays over the past few weeks, but we still have a couple of exciting features in this release!

Multi-Camera Support

Wolfgang Reissenberger devoted countless hours to bring this complex feature that required lots of architectural changes in Ekos. If you have double rigs (or even more), we have a new great feature: multi camera support! If you have more than one optical train on your mount, you now will be able to run capture sequences for each of your optical trains in parallel from the same KStars instance. You simply need to create an optical train for each of your telescopes on your mount, create camera tabs for each optical train, create their own sequence and let them run in parallel.

This new feature may also be used in combination with the scheduler: in this release, the scheduler itself will control the first camera. On top of that, you could configure additional cameras in the capture tab which could execute their own capture sequences. Enhancing the scheduler such that it could control multiple optical trains in parallel is already under development and will be part of one of the next releases. So stay tuned!

Focus Advisor v4

John Evans refactored the Focus Advisor to make it simpler while still offering a lot of insight on parameters tuning. It is now more accessible to new users and has added functionality to optimize values for 2 of the more difficult Focus parameters: Step Size and Backlash (or AF Overscan).

In addition, Focus Advisor contains a convenience tool to locate stars by searching the range of motion of the focuser and another convenience tool to highlight differences between current Focus parameter settings and those recommended by Focus Advisor.