KStars v3.6.0 is released on 2022.07.30 for MacOS, Linux, and Windows. It's a bi-monthly bugfix release with a couple of exciting features.
Linear 1 Pass Algorithm
John Evans contributed a new Focus algorithm: The Linear 1 Pass Algorithm. When using this algorithm, Ekos initially performs like the Linear algorithm in establishing the first pass V-Curve and fitting a curve to it to find the solution. Then, however, it moves directly to the calculated minimum. Key features include:
The algorithm compensates for focuser backlash, providing that backlash is consistent.
The algorithm is fast, taking 1 pass to identify optimum focus.
The algorithm uses more sophisticated curve fitting to pinpoint the optimum focus position.
The algorithm is highly configurable with user control over many parameters like step size and number of steps.
Early tests by various users shows very promising and stable results
Polar-alignment V3
Hy Murveit introduced a new Polar Alignment method based of plate solving. The original polar-alignment error measurement scheme has not changed. The user interface has changed slightly--different messages and a new LED display to indicate progress.
The original polar-alignment refresh/correction method still exists (if you choose the MoveStar or MoveStar & Cal Err refresh methods).
A new polar-alignment refresh/correction method is provided called PlateSolve. It allows for corrections of larger polar-misalignment in a single pass, does not depend on the image display, and may be more reliable if your plate solving is working well.
A new alternative to MoveStar is the PlateSolve method. This can polar align mounts with larger alignment errors in a single procedure. A similar triangle is displayed on the image display, but it is not central to this scheme.
Rather the user should concentrate on the Updated Error line at the bottom of the display, and attempt to zero the Altitude and Azimuth errors. Also, arrows display the direction the mount needs to move to reduce error.
The method works by plate-solving images as they are captured, and then estimating the user's knob-adjustments from the plate-solve solutions. Note that, since knobs may be moved during exposures, some images may have large star trails and plate solves may fail. Be patient and allow the system to capture a clean image before relying on the error estimate.
Image ROI Statistics
Madhav Prabhu made his first contribution to KStars by adding Region-Of-Interest (ROI) selection in FITS viewer where users may view statistics for a particular region of the image. The stats include average, median, and standard deviation.
You can select from existing probes of varying sizes (50x50, 100x100..etc), or you can simply hold down the Shift key and drag the mouse to create your own rectangle.
Profile Scripts
For complex equipment profile that have inter-dependencies requiring script execution or programmable delays, the new Script Profile edit provides complete control over the driver startup sequence.
You may define a Pre-Delay and Pre-Script before a driver is executed (e.g. script to turn on the observatory electricity), and define a Post driver delay and script if desired. For some drivers like Pegasus Ultimate Power Box, it is often desirable to start this driver before other drivers so that all configuration is loaded.
Geographic Map Update
Ed Lee made his first contribution to KStars by replacing the old geographic map from a new high quality version from NASA. This should play more nicely on larger monitors and high DPI displays.
Misc. Updates
Small but important quality of life improvements to KStars & Ekos.
Hy Murveit Show number of clipped pixels on fitsviewer status bar if show-clipping is enabled
Akarsh Simha Improve the manual focus dialog for the SkyMap
Sophie Taylor Correct nomenclature for Linear1 focus algorithm with "R2" -> "R²", and add a default and minimum value for R² limit
Akarsh Simha Further improvements to Add Catalog Object UI, including auto-filling data from text.
Sophie Taylor Improve tooltips for GPG expert settings
Akarsh Simha Various fixes and improvements related to DSO catalogs and visibility.
Akarsh Simha Refactor `DmsBox` widget and improve the Add Catalog Object form.
This release is packed with many small quality of life improvements and bug fixes.
Intuitive Popup Menu
We cleaned up the popup menu so that mount actions are more intuitive. Took this chance as well to add some lovely Breeze icons to the mix.
We will continue to make mount controls even more accessible, especially to users over VNC.
Live Debayering
The KStars Live Video window can now debayer frames in real-time, thereby allowing for color video streams.
FITS Viewer
A few improvements landed in FITS Viewer:
Updated Statistics display that can display value for each color channel separately, if present.
Faster loading times thanks to a performance patch by Hy Murveit.
Astrometry.net Config and Indexes
Robert Lancaster made huge improvements to the handling of Astrometry.net configuration management and indexes. This should make these features a lot more accessible to a wider pool of users.
You can edit the astrometry.net configuration file directly in KStars. Furthermore, you can easily add/remove folders that that contain the index files. Many users have the indexes files stored in external hard drivers, and with this feature, it is now very easy to add the additional folders so they get utilized by the solver.
This change is accompanied by changes to the index downloader. Now you can check all your collections, and you have the ability to download indexes to a particular folder in your collection. A green index file indicates that the file is available in the system and does not require to be downloaded.
Observatory Weather Info
Wolfgang Reissenberger continued his outstanding work in improving the Observatory Module. With this release comes weather data directly displayed in the module. Along with the configurable thresholds for Warning and Alert states, you can rest easily knowing that KStars can take the appropriate actions to protect your observatory from adverse weather conditions.
Meridian Flip
A small quality-of-life improvement to the Meridian Flip value. You can now toggle between Degrees (default) and hours. Many mounts indicate the meridian flip limit in degrees so we opted to make this as default.
Mount Control Motion Reverse
You can now reverse the direction of each axis of motion separately, in case you prefer to controls to behave in the way you expect them to in the Mount Control Panel.
Setting Coordinates Manually
The dialog now opens pre-populated with the currently selected object coordinates. You can easily switch between JNow, J2000, or your own custom Epoch.
Under The Hood
Yuri Chornoivan is the unsung hero of internationalization efforts in KStars. Many volunteers work in KDE internationalization effort and Mr. Chornoivan keeps a vigilant eye on KStars to make sure it remains accessible to the widest audience possibly globally.
Mr. Chornoivan replaced many obsolete functions in KStars with their up-to-date alternatives.
After 4 months of development, we present the KStars v3.0.0 release as an early Christmas present for our users worldwide.
KStars v3.0.0 packs a lot of features and bugfixes as we strive to develop the most comprehensive planetarium platform for computers today.
XPlanet Solar System Viewer
Robert Lancaster developed the XPlanet Solar System Viewer which is a significant improvement of the KStars built-in viewer. It can display high resolution images of all the solar system bodies in addition to numerous moons.
By adjusting a few controls, the tool can deliver an immersive experience for the user.
You can zoom, pan, and rotate all objects seamlessly using an efficient algorithm.
Improved FITS Viewer GUI
Significant improvements to FITS loading & processing were made by employing various multi-threading techniques. For large images that requires similar computational tasks, KStars creates 16/32 threads that concurrently work on processing the image data. Most of the backend code now relies on asynchronous loading of data which in turn led to a smooth experience for the users.
Robert Lancaster took on the challenge of simplifying the FITS Viewer interface in order to make all information accessible as fast as possible to the user. The updated FITS Viewer now adds a non-intrusive drawer that the user can drag to expose several functionalities such as:
FITS Header
Histogram
Statistics
Recent Images
Scheduler Improvements
Eric Dejouhanet dedicated the last few months to resolving various issues with the Ekos Scheduler. The scheduler is now a lot more robust against many complex observation requirements & scenarios. It is also more tolerance to INDI disconnections and can resume from disconnection without going into panic mode.
This is a full rewrite and verification of all steps of evaluation of a list of scheduler jobs with the following existing constraints:
Dark sky, which schedules a job to the next astronomical dusk/dawn interval.
Minimal altitude, which schedules a job up to 24 hours away to the next date and time its target is high enough in the sky.
Moon separation, combined with altitude constraint, which allows a job to schedule if its target is far enough from the Moon.
Fixed startup date and time, which schedules a job at a specific date and time.
Culmination offset, which schedules a job to start up to 24 hours away to the next date and time its target is at culmination, adjusted by an offset.
Amount of repetitions, eventually infinite, which allows a job imaging procedure to repeat multiple times or indefinitely.
Fixed completion date and time, which terminates a job at a specific date and time.
The UI now displays target altitudes at the current simulation time, and at startup and completion times. It also displays the lead time or gap time between jobs to help with imaging time optimization. Warnings appear in some situations for the user to detect problematic situations, such as a job completing under the minimal altitude.
The rewrite starts by estimating the imaging duration of each job, and eventually reorders them based on option "Sort Jobs by Altitude and Priority".
The reordering algorithm sorts jobs by altitude, considering a setting target is higher than a rising target.
When the option is enabled, targets will be automatically sorted whenever jobs are evaluated, using the current simulation time for altitude calculations.
When the option is not enabled, a button is available to reorder jobs manually, using the first job startup time for altitude calculation.
This reordering helps to optimize imaging time when preparing a schedule with multiple targets.
Scripting & DBbus
KStars makes full use of DBus to enables scripting over many aspects of the application. All the Ekos modules DBus structure was migrated to a modern Property/Method/Signal framework. Furthermore, a new DBus interface added for the Field-Of-View (FOV) objects to enable complete control over them by 3rd party applications.
Lunar Eclipses
Valentin Boettcher added functionality to calculate and draw the earths shadow disk on the Moon from any distance.
There is a new eclipse tool in the astrocalc which can find lunar eclipses quite fast. It is overhauled and modularized over the original code.
The Eclipse Tool comes with an API that can be extended for other eclipse types.
Find Dialog
The venerable Find Dialog is now persistent so it remembers the past searches. Any time you find an object, it stores it in the history list where it can be easily retrieved later.
Capture Module
The capture module now incorporates a cooler On/Off button. Additionally, user can now clear Camera configuration.
The prefix target is automatically set when slewing an object as long as there are no active capture operation.
Misc. Works
Various tasks that not immediately visible on the surface, but it improves the code quality & stability over the long term.
Dedicated Binary Object channels when communicate with INDI driver to increase throughput and responsiveness of drivers.
Fixed performance regression in Star Profile viewer.
Guide mode resets calibration when it detects pier side changing.
Migrating code to new style Qt Signal/Slot connections.
J2000/JNow support in Mount Module.
Do not cast DSO coords seconds to int as we lose important precision. Use full resolution as double.
Fix issue with subframed calibration when auto-select star is not enabled. Now subframed star position is set properly in the internal guider before.
Support for compressed FITS files (.fits.gz)
Add live view support to focus module and rework existing one in capture to be icon based.
Show loaded coords in sexigesimal format and in high precision when possible.
Do not add any camera or ST4 devices to guide module if guider is external. Instead put guider type in guider dropdown and disable it.
Honor settling time in Polar Alignment Assistant tool.
Add warning when slewing to Sun. Adjust tracking rate if supported by the mount depending on the object type.
Add option to control DSLR image viewer. It can now be turned off.
Improve PHD2 support.
Thanks to
Yuri Chornoivan excellent maintenance for the documentation, spelling, and grammatical mistakes introduced by us. Thank you Yuri for putting up with our terrible spellings!
I'm very glad to announce the release of KStars v2.7.0 (Menkab)! This new version brings improvements all over the board, from speed improvements, better cross-platform support, and Android mobile/tablet support is now finally merged into mainline KStars!
Here is a short demo made by Artem Fedoskin, our GSoC 2016 student and currently an active developer of KStars:
We are still working on a few minor issues with the KStars Lite for Android before we release it soon on the Google Play Store.
Using KStars on embedded devices such as Raspberry PI provides a much better experience now thanks to order-of-magnitude speedups made by Akarsh Simha that cut some computation cycles by over 50%!
Another important feature is object internet lookup from online catalogs! It is a very exciting feature developed by Akarsh that enables you to find any object whether it exists in KStars catalogs, or any online catalog. Akarsh made a great video to explain how to use this neat feature:
Significant changes were made to improve Ekos GUI. It is now much more compact and accessible, especially on low-resolution displays.
Internally, the guide module was completely rewritten to enable support of multiple external guiders. Now we support lin_guider in addition to PHD2 and of course the internal guider. Performing guiding and autofocusing is now a lot more intuitive since the FITSView is embedded within the module, and not as an external window in prior versions. This streamlines the astrophotography workflow even further and makes monitoring changes quite handy.
The guide drift graphics was rewritten in QCustomPlot and provides many facilities to inspect the data along with zooming and panning support plus the long-request RA/DE legend! Guiding control parameters were updated to provide finer control over the guiding process and can control not only guiding pulse corrections, but also their polarity within each axis.
The alignment module received minor improvements as well, but most importantly, it now detects parity after first capture and reuses this value for future captures. Reusing the parity should cut solving time in half since the astrometry.net solver attempts to search over both positive and negative polarities by default. The overall alignment GUI was made simpler with only options necessary to perform the alignment process remaining while all additional options were moved to the KStars settings.
Focus module also received significant updates! All focus operations are performed from within the embedded FITSView. Furthermore, the user can now select which focus algorithm to utilize to calculate the Half-Flux-Radius (HFR) value. I developed a new gradient-based focusing algorithm in addition to the previous centroid and threshold algorithms. This new algorithm is less susceptible to noise and gives far more accurate HFR values even for donut-shaped stars. It is used by default but the user may change to any algorithm at any time.
In previous versions, each Ekos module supported capture of dark frames, but each module was handling it separately. Furthermore, the dark frames were captured, subtracted, and then discarded. With 2.7.0, a universal dark library was developed whereas dark frames are reused once they are captured. By default, dark frames are reused for 30 days. When any setting that may affect the dark frame validity such as binning, exposure time, temperature..etc is changed, a new dark frame is captured and stored for future use. This is now shared across all modules, so if you take a dark frame in the focus module, it can be used across Ekos.
Additionally, the capture module also received a face-lift and now includes options to specify upload mode and remote directory to save images. This resolved a conflict where one directory was used to save remote and local images. The user may also pause/resume sequences whenever desired.
The following summary is written by our newest development team member: Robert Lancaster. Robert was instrumental in bringing many improvements to the FITSViewer tool and KStars support on Mac OSX.
The KStars FITSViewer and its embedded FITSView have received numerous enhancements with KStars v2.7. First, the FITSView zooming behavior has been refined so that if a point in the image has been selected with a marker or if there is a focus/alignment box in the image, by default it will zoom in or out on that point. If there is not a point selected, the zooming behavior will center on whatever region is currently centered in the FITSView viewport. In addition, for people who have track pads attached to their computer, the pinch gesture has been implemented for zooming in and out on any FITSView. A second useful trackpad gesture that was implemented in any FITSView is the pan gesture, so now you can not only use your trackpad to pinch for zooming in and out, but you can also use it for panning around the image easily. For those who do not have trackpads, clicking to drag the image for FITSViews that are embedded in the FITSViewer was implemented to make it easy to pan around the image.
Another set of additions to the FITSViewer is several overlays that allow you to more easily center objects in the FITSViewer and/or compose your exposure. One overlay, the Cross Hair, gives you a target in the center of your image and two axes, so you can see the horizontal and vertical centerlines of your image. This overlay is extremely important for those who are not using the Align Module to do their telescope alignment so that they can be sure they have centered the star that they are using to sync. A second overlay, the Pixel Grid, gives you a full grid overlay for your image so that you can quickly estimate pixel distances to different points in your image and easily compose your shot. These overlays can be turned on at the same time and will not interfere with each other.
A third major enhancement to the FITSViewer is the addition of several features that make use of the WCS Headers in WCS-enabled FITS files. If you have installed and set the correct path to wcsinfo and have already plate solved an image with your setup, then your images you take with Ekos will have WCS information in them. You can also add WCS Information to an image by using either the online plate solver from nova.astrometry.net or by using the command-line based plate solving routine solve-field. The good news is that the WCS information is loaded in a separate thread so it does not slow down the rest of the program. Once an image with WCS header information in it has been loaded into the FITSViewer, the new WCS based tools will be enabled. The first thing you will notice when you load such a file is that the RA and DEC of your mouse cursor will be displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the FITSViewer. This behavior is not new, but what is new is a feature where you can put your mouse over a deep sky object in your image and a ToolTip should pop up that identifies the object.
If you then right click on the object, you will get a contextual menu that provides options for getting details about the object, downloading sky survey images about the object, centering the object in the Skymap, and even centering the object in a connected telescope. The menu looks extremely similar to the contextual menu that pops up if you right click an object in the Skymap.
There are also several other functions in the FITSViewer toolbar which are useful to WCS enabled images and whose buttons are only enabled when an image containing WCS information is loaded. The first one of these is an overlay plot, which puts an Equatorial Coordinate grid on the image with regularly spaced and labeled gridlines. The second button overlays a set of marker points and labels for all of the deep sky objects identified in your image. A third button will enable a mouse tool that will let you click on any point in your captured image to re-center your telescope on that point. This is extremely useful for framing your deep sky photos
Finally, this new version of KStars provides greatly enhanced support for the Mac OS X platform. While an installer is still in the works, and some bugs are still being worked out, KStars has become fully functional on the Macintosh platform. Several months ago, KStars was very difficult to install on the OS X platform and even when it was successfully installed, numerous features were not working properly. After a successful install procedure was finally hashed out in mid-September 2016, the work of getting all of the bugs identified and worked out could begin. Over the course of the next month, numerous issues were identified, investigated, and in many cases, solved. One of the first issues was getting the icons working since kde icon themes are not supported in OS X. This issue was resolved by bundling the icons.
Another issue was getting astrometry.net, libinidi, and gsc properly built and installed so that the tools used by Ekos could have native support on OS X. The solution here was just to develop a procedure to install them, though on Mac OS Sierra, there may still be an issue installing libindi on some computers. Even so, KStars on OS X could still access remote INDI-servers. By the end of September, KStars was working pretty well on OS X, but it still needed some work. For OS X, the inclusion of pan and pinch gestures in the FITSView/FITSViewer as described above are vital on a computer like a Macbook because the gestures are much easier to use than the scroll-wheel emulation. Once the FITSViewer upgrades were finished in mid-October, work on the KStars OS X bugs could resume. A minor annoyance was that all the windows were independent of one another and thus sometimes, dialog windows could end up lost behind the KStars main window. This was resolved by making many of the KStars windows Tool windows on OS X, except the Ekos Manager, the INDI Device Manager, and the FITSViewer which each received special code to make them stay on top of the other KStars windows. One of the last major bugs in KStars on the OS X platform was the inability to load/use the “Get New Stuff” Download Manager. This feature is very important for downloading images of deep sky objects and different sky catalogs. It was finally resolved in late October by setting some environment variables and launching the KDE program kdeinit5 from within KStars.
While KStars is now fully functional on OS X, it is still being tested and more bugs are likely to be found. It is hoped that in the near future, a simple installer or dmg image file can be developed for a streamlined installation process. But until then, following the instructions should get you a functional KStars installation on OS X.
The FITS histogram tool is one of the few tools in KStars that did not receive any significant updates for more than 10+ years. I first wrote it back in 2004 and used a custom painting widget to show the overall shape of the histogram. But with KStars gaining color FITS support a while back, it was necessary to support multi-channel histogram within the viewer.
While the FITSViewer tool, as the name suggests, is not designed for processing of astrophotography images; features such as the histogram and statistics tools are often important for decision-making during the capture process and for quickly inspecting images, and hence they were made available to the end user. The histogram implementation was also quite buggy as it was designed for 8-bit FITS, but now KStars support 8, 16, 32-bit signed integer, 32-bit IEEE floating point, and 64-bit IEEE double precision floating point. The updated implementation now caters to all data types and is smarter about selection of bin widths for each image.
In addition to supporting multi-channel histograms, the GUI was revamped and is now utilizing the amazing QCustomPlot library. At first, I wanted to utilize the KPlotting KDE library, which was authored by our very own Jason Harris, KStars founder back in 2001! But QCustomPlot offers several advantages over KPlotting including user interaction capabilities such as zoom and drag in addition to a host of other features. Furthermore, QCustomPlot is being actively developed while KPlotting hasn't received any noticeable updates in a very long time.
The following is a screenshot of the older histogram implementation:
