KStars v3.7.6 is Released

KStars v3.7.6 is released on 2025.04.01 for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.

Scheduler Plans Visualized

Hy Murveit added a graph to the Scheduler page that displays visually the scheduler's plans--the same plans described in the log at the bottom of that page, and partially described in the scheduler's table. You can see altitude graphs for all the scheduler jobs, which are highlighted in green when that job is planned to be active. The next two nights of the plan can be accessed using buttons to the right (and left) of the graph. The graph can be enlarged or hidden by sliding the "splitter" handle above it up or down.

PHD2 & Internal Guider RMS

Many users reported differences between the RMS value reported by Ekos internal guider vs PHD2. This is not a new issue as there was a difference in RMS calculations ever since Ekos Guider module was developed over a decade ago. In this release, we updated the internal Guider RMS calculations to use the same algorithm used by PHD2. This way, there is now a more consistent metric to judge the performance of the two guider systems.

Weather Scheduler Integration

Weather station integration with the scheduler was improved. The weather enforcement is now global and not per job. If weather enforcement is enabled, you can adjust the Grace Period (default 10 minutes) in cases where the scheduler cannot be started due to a weather Alert or Warning. 

When a weather warning is received, existing jobs can continue to execute but new jobs will not be executed until the weather situation improves. Upon detecting a weather hazard, the scheduler execute a Soft shutdown mode where it can park the mount and dome, but still retains connection with INDI drivers to continue monitoring the weather situation. If the weather does not improve by the Grace Period, it then commences a full shutdown of the observatory. Otherwise, it should resume the job from where it was left.

Contrast Based Focusing

John Evans added an option to allow focusing on non-star fields by using various contrast based algorithms. This is suitable for Lunar, Solar and planetary imaging.

Autofocus Optimization

John Evans added an option has been added to Focus that allows an Autofocus run to re-use a previous successful Autofocus result if the previous AF run occurred within a user-defined time period, say <10mins ago. This can speed up certain situations when using the Scheduler where multiple Autofocus requests can happen within a short period of time.

Imaging Planner Improvements

Hy Murveit pushed a new Imaging Planner catalog release along with improvements to the KStars Imaging Planner.

• It should now start up much more quickly on first use, or first use after a catalog upgrade.
  
• There were stability improvements.
  
• The catalog was extended to include 770 objects.
  

Upgrade to KStars 3.7.6, use Data -> Download New Data to get the latest Imaging Planner catalog, and run Load Catalog in the Imaging Planner tool to take advantage of all these improvements.

Quick Go & Rotate

Added support to Go and Rotate in Framing Assistant. This would command fast go to target and then followed by rotation to match position angle indicated. Simply adjust the Position Angle to your desired angle then command Ekos to solve and rotate in one go.

Scheduler Coordinates Flexibility

Wolfgang Reissenberger introduced enhancements for handling target coordinates in the scheduler module:

• Add an option to switch the target coordinates between J2000 and JNow. This is interesting for those cases where the user wants to enter the coordinates manually, but has the coordinates only in JNow - for example when taking them over from the align module.
• Add a "use the current target" button. Currently, there is only an option to take over the current skymap center.

Furthermore, during the time where the moon is visible, it should be possible to schedule only those jobs that are not disturbed by moonlight (e.g. H-alpha captures). To enable this, a new optional constraint is introduced where the maximal moon altitude could be set.

Use PHD2-scheme graph

Toni Schriber modified the internal guider chart to use PHD2-scheme (RA/DEC) for graph of guide mount drift. This should help comparisons between PHD2 and internal guider more consistent.

KStars v3.7.4 is Released

KStars v3.7.4 is released on 2024.12.05 for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.

Imaging Planner

Hy Murveit added a brand new Imaging Planner in KStars to facilitate imaging.

The Imaging Planner tool helps users choose which objects to image. Users can download catalogs of recommended objects, or possibly create and share their own catalogs. The tool computes when the objects in a read-in catalog may be imaged on the selected night given constraints such as minimum altitude, terrain and moon separation.

It can sort the objects along several different dimensions including the number of hours an object may be imaged tonight (given the users geography, constraints and possibly artificial horizon), its peak altitude, distance from the moon, constellation, name and type. Objects can also be filtered out for several reasons (e.g. type of object, whether it was previously imaged, keywords the user has added, whether the object has been selected, user not interested, etc). 

This tool helps users research the objects by showing small images of the objects, showing the objects' sky locations on the skymap, and by providing links to follow to internet sites with more information and images. It allows users to attach notes and links to objects, and select certain of them for further consideration. This tool can be used in conjunction with the Ekos imager or any other imaging tool. It does not currently directly interact with the actual imager; it only helps the user decide what to image.

Simbad Integration with FITSViewer

John Evans added a new, experimental feature to the FITSViewer that allows the user to dynamically query the SIMBAD astronomical database and highlight the results on the image in the FITSViewer. The user draws a circle on the image and the objects within that circle are then displayed in a table and on the image.

It is possible to filter by object type and click through to the Simbad / CDS or NED websites for more information about the objects.

This is an interesting tool to see what is in your image, be it a subframe whilst you are imaging or a completed image that you have reloaded into the FITSViewer.

In order to use the feature you will need an internet connection to access the online Simbad database and an image must have WCS enabled within the FITSViewer. For the most accurate results, plate solve the image with the build-in FITSViewer plate solver. The feature is controlled by a toggle in the FITSViewer options.

New Focus Measures

John Evans introduced a new contrast based focusing algorithm suited for solar and planetary imaging. 

4 new focus measures have been added to the Focus Module to complement the existing measures of HFR, FWHM, etc.
·      StdDev. This is similar conceptually to the Fourier Algorithm but is simpler. It uses an algorithm based on the standard deviation of the pixels in the image as the measure of focus. It can be used on star fields.
·      Contrast based measures use algorithms that can be found in other areas of image processing and uses the contrast of texture in the image in various way as a measure of focus. The following measures are available:

o   Sobel
o   Laplassian
o   Canny

These measures require some form of extended object in the image so will not work on star fields. They are intended for Solar, Lunar and planetary focusing.

 

These algorithms can be used on the whole image or with the existing mask features, or with a user-defined region-of-interest that is used in single-star mode for star based focusing measures.
 
This new feature requires the openCV library to be installed (a standard installation is fine). This library is not installed by default with Kstars so anyone wishing to use these features will need to first install openCV and then rebuild Kstars on their system. It will not be available with pre-built executables.

KStars 3.7.0 is Released

KStars v3.7.0 is released on 2024.04.05 for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.

CI & CD Infrastructure

We say goodbye to KDE's binary factory as we transition to fully use Gitlab's CI/CD pipelines to build, test, and publish KStars. Over the last two months, Eric Dejouhanet worked with the KDE's Craft & System admin teams to transition KStars pipelines to the new framework. 

Short status on pipelines:

• Merge requests run the custom build and the CI builds
• Master runs the CI build (though there could be other things we run, such as CVE scans)
• Craft recipes are run from the last commit of the master or release branch, they require "build" and "build-and-test-stable" to be run manually beforehand.
• Publishing to Microsoft store is available after the Windows Craft is run.

This is still an ongoing process and we hope to have this process fully automated by 3.7.1 release where we will automatically publish latest releases for both stable and master branches.

Donut Buster

Rejoice Newtonian, SCT, and RC owners! With KStars new Donut Buster feature, your donut focusing woes might be something of the past. John Evans implemented this experimental feature to help protect against outliers that might affect your autofocus routine. In addition to that, the Focus Advisor is now automatically applied when creating new profiles. Based on the type of equipment you have in your optical train, the Focus Advisor would try to guess the optimal focus settings for your setup. Both features are experimental and would benefit from your feedback.

Custom Views

Akarsh Simha introduced the ability to orient the sky map to match the view through any instrument.

A view is a collection of settings: the orientation of the sky map, how the orientation changes as the sky map is panned, whether it is mirrored or not, and optionally the field-of-view to set the map to.

If no views are defined, KStars introduces a set of standard / "demo" views by default. Existing views can be edited and new views can be added using the "Edit Views..." interface. They can also be re-ordered in the interface. The ordering of the views in the "Edit Views..." dialog defines the order in which views will be cycled through using the keyboard shortcuts Shift + Page Up and Shift + Page Down. Thus, you can set up the views for easily switching between naked eye / finder scope / telescope views for easy star-hopping.

Furthermore, there is a new option in the View menu that enables mirroring the sky map so as to be able to match the view through an erecting prism used for example on a Schmidt-Cassegrain or Refracting type telescope.

The rotation feature overlay now also marks East in addition to north and zenith, so as to know easily whether the display is mirrored or not.

Blinking

Hy Murveit added a very useful Blinking feature to the FITS Viewer tool. This adds several ways to blink; that is, compare multiple images.

In Analyze, one can now move from one session to the next (forward or backward).
Keyboard shortcuts are provided for that.

Another set of keyboard shortcuts both advance and show the next image in the same FITS Viewer.

Thus, for example, one can advance through all the captured images of the evening, showing all the captures on the FITS Viewer by repeating a keyboard shortcut.

A useful complement to this might be adding the ability to delete bad captures, but for now that will have to wait for a rainy day.

In the FITS Viewer, the Open File menu command (both in the main KStars top menu, and in the FITS Viewer menu) now allows multiple files to be selected. If they are then the files are opened in individual tabs.

Shift-selecting would select files from the first to the shift-clicked file. Clearly one wouldn't want to select 100 files resulting in 100 tabs, but this can be used to, e.g. compare 10 images.

Going along with the above, keyboard shortcuts have been added to move to the next or previous FITS Viewer tab, Also helpful to the above is a new command to zoom in/out all tabs (not just the current one).

There is a new Blink Directory menu command (in both menus, as above) which will open a single tab with a list of all the images below the directory selected (that is, both in that directory, and in directories below it). It initially displays the first image, but new commands work in that tab to switch to displaying the next (or previous) image file in the list. This could be used to blink hundreds of files.

Sky Flats

Dušan Poizl added an option to capturing sky flats. When shooting flats at sky it often end up in never-ending loop of adjusting exposure because intensity of light change and calculation of exposure break down. Adjust the tolerance to 2000 ADU to higher for a better chance at capturing sky flats.

Scheduler Refactor

Wolfgang Reissenberger continues with his work on Separating Business Logic from UI in Scheduler. Over the years the Scheduler has grown to one of the most complex classes. With this release we refactored the Scheduler class and separated the UI from the underlying state model and its business logic. This opens the door for future development of new scheduling features and a much modular approach towards more flexible sequencing approaches.

Standalone Editor

To add any job to the scheduler, you need at minimum the following:

1. Target
2. Sequence File

The sequence file contains all your sequence settings (e.g. Capture 20x15 LRGB images). To create this file, you first need to add sequence job in the Capture module and then save the corresponding sequence. While this facilitates re-usability across different sessions, some users wanted to create sequence on-the-fly in the scheduler.

Hy Murveit developed the standalone sequence editor in the scheduler module where it relies on settings saved from your last astrophotography session. Now it's easier than ever to plan scheduler jobs without having Ekos or your equipment profile running!

   

KStars v3.6.5 is Released

 

KStars v3.6.5 is released on 2023.06.01 for MacOS, Linux, and Windows. It's a bi-monthly bugfix release with a couple of exciting features.

Sky Map Rotation

Akarsh Simha added a new feature to allow the user to rotate the sky map. It also allows some standard settings like inverted view. Here are some the highlights:

1. Rotate the sky-map freely: Shift + mouse drag on the sky map
2. Pick pre-defined orientations: Zenith Up / Zenith Down / North Up / North Down depending on the coordinate system being used
3. A magic mode for Dobsonians: The Erect Observer Correction feature, when selected along with Horizontal Coordinates / Zenith Down settings, will reproduce the orientation seen in the eyepiece of a Dobsonian. May need a one-time adjustment for your specific Dobsonian using the shift + drag feature.

Optimal Sub-Exposure Calculator

Joseph McGee made his first contributor to KStars with the Optimal Sub-Exposure Calculator. This is the first iteration of the calculator and only a handful of camera profiles is supported. There are different points of view within the astrophtography community on how optimal sub-exposure should be calculated and whether we should consider other factors such as processing time given the volume of data produced. Your feedback would be appreciated on this first iteration of the calculator.

Implementation of an optimal sub-exposure calculator based upon the work of, and presentation by, Dr Robin Glover. The calculator considers multiple inputs to determine a sub-exposure time which will provide minimal overall noise in the image:

• A sky quality measurement (SQM) for light pollution
• The optic focal length
• A filter bandwidth
• Camera read-noise (based upon gain/iso)
• An optional adjustment to the allowable increase in noise from light pollution

As inputs are adjusted the calculator will refresh graphic presentation of potential exposure times of the range of gains, and update calculated outputs. The output values are separated into two sections: one for the sub-exposure, and another for image stacks of various integration times.

The sub-exposure outputs are:

• the optimal sub-exposure time
• the count of electrons produced from light-pollution
• the shot noise, (noise from light pollution)
• the total exposure noise, (the combined noise from light-pollution and camera read-noise)

The image stack information is presented in a table showing:

• planned integration hours
• the count of exposures to reach the planned integration hours
• the actual stack (integration time) in seconds
• the noise for the stack
• a ration of stack time to noise, (as a indicator of quality)

An instance of the sub-exposure calculator can be started from a new 'clock' icon on the ekos capture screen. Multiple instances of the sub-exposure calculator can be started concurrently so that side-by-side comparisons can be made for variations in inputs.

Data for camera read-noise will be provided through individual xml files which will be user maintained and published in a repository. These camera data files persisted within a folder "exposure_calculator" under user/local/share/kstars. The calculator includes the capability to download camera files from a repository. Upon the initial start of the calculator at least one camera data file download will be mandatory before the calculator can be instantiated.

The intent is that camera data file names will be used to allow the calculator to select an appropriate camera data file based upon the device id of the active camera. (But some of the initial camera files were named using educated guesses, and will likely need to be re-named).

Rotator Dialog Improvements

Toni Schriber merged improvements and fixes for the Rotator Dialog. As shown in the illustrations the user interface is very simple and there is only one parameter to set: The Camera Position Angle. It is a very consistent term and easy to understand. The same Position Angle (PA) is also used in Alignment, Scheduler, and the Sky Map.

In the gauge this angle is presented in the same color as the FOV in the planetarium sky and in viewing direction. This way one can relate and understand this angle intuitively. The rotator angle is presented in gray and also in viewing direction. This angle is calculated from the Camera PA and the Cameras Offset Angle which is calibrated each time a [Capture & Solve] or a [Load & Slew] is brought into action. For further clarity the rotator angle and the camera offset is displayed again in a information window together with the current pier side.

The Rotator Settings can be accessed either in the Capture or Align modules.

Focus Linear 1 Pass Improvements

John Evans continued his phenomenal improvements to Ekos Focus module with L1P Phase 2 changes as detailed in the Linear Focus Phase 2 document. Here are the highlights:

1. Optimized curve fitting . Should be faster and more accurate and includes outlier rejection.
2. Currently HFR is the only fitting "measure" available. The following have been added: a) HFR Adj (adjusted HFR to compensate for star brightness vs background variation) b) FWHM c) Number stars (max at focus rather than a min) d) Fourier Power (alternative focus method not requiring star detection)
3. Focus units can be displayed in pixels or arc-seconds.
4. Critical Focus Zone - a calculator with 3 different algorithms has been added
5. Focus Offset Utility to automatically build focus offsets.
6. Take flats at same focus point as lights has been fixed.
7. Focus Adviser. Still working on this but a tool to help with focus parameters (since there are now so many).
8. SEP parameters suggestions for focus. Keen to get some feedback on this.
9. Adaptive focus to adapt the focuser position between Autofocus runs, aiming to keep optimum focus for each sub-frame. Adaptations for Temperature and Altitude are supported.
10. Adaptive focuser start . The starting position for an AF run can be filter and Adaptive Focus adjusted.
11. Focus walks added to control how the inward sweep of the AF process performs.
12. AF Overscan originally implemented in the Linear algorithm and then reused by Linear 1 Pass now extended to all focuser movements.

In addition to HFR, you can now use different measurements (FHWM, # of Stars, Fourier Power) that may work well with your setup and environment. Here are some focus runs with each of the new measurements types. You will notice that the solutions are very close to each other.

FWHM

# Of Stars

Fourier Power

Focus Aberration Inspector

Wolfgang Reissenberger introduced the mosaic view well known from PixInsight's AberrationInspector script that builds a mosaic from all image corners and center tiles such that they can be compared directly.

Supernovae are back

The last few releases was missing supernovae data since the online source that was providing the data decided to go offline. Thankfully, Philipp Auersperg-Castell communicated with the fine folks over the Transient Name Server (IAU Supernovae Working Group) to obtain daily supernovae updates and imported them to KStars. All Recent supernovae should be available now in KStars.

KStars v3.4.3 is Released

After 3 months of development, we're glad to announce the availability of KStars 3.4.3 for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Let's check out the highlight of this release!

New Bahtinov Mask Focus Assistant

Patrick Molenaar added a long requested feature: The Bahtinov Mask focus assistant tool. Users can activate the new algorithm in the Focus module.

Focus Bahtinov Assistant Tool

It is useful for users who do not have a motorized focuser and prefer to focus manually with the aid of the mask. After capturing an image in the focus module with the Bahtinov mask algorithm selected, Ekos would analyze the images and stars within it.  if Ekos recognizes the Bahtinov star pattern, it will draw lines over the star pattern en circles on the center and on an offset to indicate the focus.

Autofocus on Temperature Change

Florian Signoret added support for triggering autofocus procedure when the temperature exceeds a certain delta threshold in the capture module. The temperature is sourced primarily from the focuser itself, and in unavailable, then it falls back to the weather station, if any.

Focus Logs

Doug Summers added a dedicated focus logger to help users analyze their autofocus runs to better understand their behavior and improve them in the future.

Camera Driver Restart

An experimental camera driver restart feature was added to the capture module. It should be used as a last resort option in case the camera driver is unresponsive. This feature commands the INDI server to only restart the camera driver without affecting any other drivers, so you don't have to shutdown the whole INDI server if one driver misbehaves. 

Restarting a camera driver might lead to quite a few complicated since it interacts with many subsystems in Ekos. Therefore, it is flagged as experimental in this release pending user feedback.

Mount Hour Angle Limits

Previously Ekos Mount module supported enforcing Altitude limit for the mount motion. The mount is active stopped if its slew or track past there limits. Chris Rowland added the Hour Angle (HA) limits to prevent limit the mount from slewing and/or tracking past there limits. This can protect the equipment in case of a runaway motion that might lead a pier collision.

Filter Names Editor

A simple, but convenient editor was added in Capture module to edit filter names. Previously, you had to change filter names directly in INDI Control Panel which was not intuitive for quite a few users.

Internal Guider Features

Hy Murveint contributed significant new features and improvement to the Ekos Internal Guider.

New Detection Algorithm: SEP MultiStar

This is a new guide-star detection, tracking & drift computation algorithm.

You can select this in the Guide options menu (click Options... in the lower right corner of the Guide tab), and then click on "Guide", and then choose from the "algorithm" menu. There choose the guide-star detector. (e.g. there choices include Smart, SEP, Fast, ...). Try SEP MultiStar. It is more stable in all three respects (guide star selection, detection and drift calculation). You may not notice much difference in a normal guiding session when things are going well, except, perhaps, better choice of a guide star.

GPG RA Guiding: New control algorithm for RA guiding.

Hy added a new guiding algorithm. This is for RA only--that is, guiding for DEC still happens, but using the existing guiding algorithms. This guider is based on the work in this PhD thesis and is the same as the well-regarded PHD2 guide algorithm known as Predictive PEC. You will see Copyright 2014-2017 Max Planck Society, now in the KStars credits for this system. It estimates the periodic error in the guiding system, and tries to fix it before it happens. This system should perform about the same as the standard guider for the first period or two of your mount's periodic error, then improve. When using this system, it's best to set in advance what your mount's worm-gear period is. For example, the Orion Atlas pro is about 480s. You enable this in the Guide options menu, in the GPG RA tab, and then checking "Enable GPG". There are other parameters you can change, but as indicated earlier, the main one to think about is "Major Period".

Graphics Improvements

1. Added a guide-star SNR plot. This can be useful, e.g. when the SNR starts taking a dive, you know things aren't going well, perhaps a cloud is passing by.
2. Added a plot of the RMS error (i.e. RA and/or DEC arc-second error RMS-averaged over the past 50 guiding samples).
3. Separated the zooming for x and y axes. You can use '+' and '-' buttons below the x-axis to change the time scale of the plot (number of minutes plotted), and you can use the mouse scroll (same as before) to zoom in/out of the Y-axis. When you mouse-over the plot, you can see all the values for the different graphs.BTW, in case you didn't know (this isn't something I changed), you can change the amount of space allocated to the drift plot (the circle) and the drift graph by placing your mouse over the short dotted line between them and dragging left of right.

Calibration Backlash Removal

A backlash removal section was added to the "calibration dance". Before it starts calibrating DEC, the Ekos guider will now take 5 DEC steps, without measurement, to make sure there's no backlash in the DEC gears. This should improve the quality of the calibration, however, if you don't like this, you can remove it by unchecking "Remove DEC backlash in guide calibration" in the Guide options menu, in the "Calibration" tab there.

Calibration Plot

A Calibration Plot subtab was added to the right right of the Drift Plot.  It shows the mount positions recorded during internal-guider calibration.

Basically, if things are going well, it should display dots in two lines which are at right angles to each other--one when the calibration pushes the mount back and forth along the RA direction, and then when it does the same for the DEC direction. Not a ton of info, but can be useful to see. If the two lines are at a 30-degree angle, something's not going well with your calibration! Here's a picture of it in action using the simulator

The colored dots (same color scheme as the internal guider) shows the RA and DEC samples on their way out, and the small white and yellow circles show their return paths.

PHDLogView compatibility

phdlogview is a program written by Andy Galasso to analyze PHD2 logs. It's very nice. I've tried to have the internal guider output a mostly compatible log file so that if you installed phdlogview, you could use it to also browse your logs from the Ekos internal guider. A few things to note:
The logs are placed in a directory parallel to the standard KStars logs directory. Instead of logs, it is guidelogs. So, for example, on Linux you'd find them in this directory ~/.local/share/kstars/guidelogs/
You can turn on/off this logging by going into the Options menu on the internal guider tab, clicking on the Guide tab on the left and checking/un-checking the box labeled "Save Internal Guider User Log".

There are many features in phdlogview. Explore and look at Galasso's documentation for how to use it.

PHD2 Integration Fixes

Eric Dejouhanet significantly improved fault tolerance during PHD2 interactions. This includes the following situations.

• Star does not move enough for calibration to complete. PHD2 may:
  • be looping instead of calibrating, while still notifying calibration.
  • abort but continue to send guide steps and frames.
  • => Fixed: calibration failures are now properly handled in that situation, and forwarded to Guide module.
• Star disappears because of a mount glitch. PHD2 may:
  • declare star lost and stop without further notice.
  • => Fixed: star-lost notification is now properly handled, and will time out properly (and not restart).
• Device disconnects briefly. PHD2 may:
  • declare device unusable, eventually after some time (camera timeout is 15s by default), requiring reconnect.
  • => Fixed: equipment dis/connection is now properly handled from both sides, aborts operations and is robust.
• KStars/Ekos crashes while guiding and is restarted using the existing indiserver.
  • The currentCCD may be null when restoring connection, upon call to executeOneOperation.
  • AppState has to be taken into consideration to restore state as it was before the crash.
  • => Fixed: app-state polling improves robustness, requires up-to-date INDI build.
• If Ekos is told the equipment is disconnected, it will consider an external cause and will not attempt to reconnect.
  • Ekos will not reconnect, to allow manual intervention is required on PHD2 side.
  • Ekos will detect reconnection and change state automatically.
• However PHD2 v2.6.8 crashes when INDI drivers are killed, so no solution except restarting PHD2 in a loop (use systemd).
• One issue remains in Guide, where the stop button remains enabled sometimes (regression?).
  • May not fix in the context of this MR.
• One issue remains upon server loss, which triggers perpetual reconnect unless the end-user disconnects manually.
  • Issue related to state kept at disconnected.

New LED indicators were added for each stage as a visual feedback for the user.

Other Fixes

• Almanc batch output date fixed.
• Code refactoring unifying capture initialization for new sequences and continuing of sequences
• Internal guider didn't take binning into account when computing arc-seconds.
• Fix issue with Meridian Flip Retry.
• Add function to get UTC datetime from DATE-OBS header field.
• Allow for the case where the mount uses the pointing state early.
• Added profile name uniqueness requirement.
• Bugfix for correct activation of dome and weather UI.
• Major refactoring of refraction corrections that fixes some bugs.
• Add explicit offset control. Separate ISO and Gain controls.

Check out the complete changelog for more details.

KStars v3.3.9 is Released

We kickoff 2020 with a brand new KStars v3.3.9 release for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

This release incorporates the continued improvements to KStars base while introducing new long-awaited features in a few areas.

Stretch Controls

Hy Murveit implemented adjustable and fast stretch controls for mono and color images within the FITS Viewer. These allow fine changes in Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights clipping even for high resolution astro-photos.

Adjusting the controls do not change the underlying data, only the previewed image. After any stretch adjustment is made, the user can always revert to the automatic stretching again by clicking on the small wizard icon at the bottom right corner of the controls panel.

Experimental Linear Focusing Algorithm

Hy Murveit developed a new experimental linear focusing algorithm.  Linear focuser is a simple autofocus algorithm that always scans in, sampling at regularly spaced intervals. It may be slower than the other algorithms, but the hope is that by minimizing direction changes backlash will be minimized and the algorithm may provide more stable autofocus results.

This change also introduces an interface that hides the implementation of the autofocus algorithm, and future changes may moved the other existing algorithms into this framework.

Linear focuser mainly works well when started near the ultimate focus position. It depends on the step-size, max-travel, and tolerance parameters, which should be chosen well. It may take more iterations to find focus than the other algorithms.

Piotr Zyziuk improve Focus Module in Ekos by adding autofocus support for DSLR's that use manualfocusdrive command by gphoto instead of rel_focus_position for example, Nikon Z6 manual focusing only works in the "liveview" aka "preview" mode (with mirror up). In "non preview" mode the focus motor is only controllable by the autofocus engine. This change should also be applicable to Canon cameras.

New western Sky Culture

KStars now includes an option for a new standard western sky culture, thanks to work by Edgar Scholz over at sternenkarten.com. The constellations from this sky culture are based on work by H.A. Rey. They are often more intuitive and easier to remember than the classical Greek and Roman inspired constellations. The new sky culture mixes the best more intuitive representations from both worlds in addition to completely new shapes painted by Mr. Scholz himself.

Aquarius in a different Sky Culture

Bug Fixes

• Bugfix for re-connecting a weather device initializes the weather display.
• Fix off-by-one bug in stretch.
• Fix video streaming resize crash on Windows.
• Fix minor EBN issues.
• Account for exposure less than 0.001 seconds in the file name.
• For windows, when index 1 is selected from the combo box it should be considered REMOTE.
• Bugfix for re-connecting a weather device initializes the weather display.
• Making the Columns in the Align view resize automatically.
• Add markers for the documentation configuration pages, add some info about sky cultures
• Abort plate solving when slewing is detected.
• Fix crash when focused object is either asteroid or comet and the data is loaded.
• Fix bug re filter-change-autofocus.
• Reset guiding calibration if the mount moves and "Always Reset Guide Calibration" option is set.