KStars 2.7.5 is released for MacOS and Windows

I'm very excited to announce the release of KStars 2.7.5 for MacOS and Windows!

This is the first official KStars release for MacOS 10.11+, and while we made sure to test it thoroughly, please treat it as a beta release and report any bugs to the KDE bug tracking website.

KStars for MacOS supports all the features of the Linux KStars release, including Ekos and INDI. It comes ready with astrometry.net support, xplanet, and ability to download and install General Star Catalog (GSC) data used for CCD Simulator stars.

Most INDI drivers are imported with the exception of few Linux-specific drivers; we are investigating different approaches to improve INDI 3rd party drivers support under OSX. This release would not have been possible if not for the tireless efforts of KStars developers and INDI forums members.

Specifically, I'd like to thank the following volunteers for their significant contribution to the MacOS release:

• Robert Lancaster: KStars latest developer and chief driver of the MacOS release. Robert greatly improved the usability and cross-platform capabilities of KStars while adding several very exciting and useful features to both KStars and Ekos.
• Stephane Lucas: Initiated the longest (110+ pages) INDI thread Ekos for OS X that resulted in this release. Stephane carried out extensive testing and suggestions for Ekos Scheduler and aided in the KStars OSX Port.
• Jamie Smith: Developed script to automate building of KStars using Craft, CMake, and XCode methods in addition to automating DMG builds.

Many INDI forums users also helped in testing this release, so I'd like to extend my thanks to all our users.

Along with the Mac OS release, a new KStars for Windows 64bit release is also available for download. You can download both release from KStars website.

KStars 2.7.4 for Windows is released!

Glad to announce the release of KStars v2.7.4 for Windows 64bit. This version is built a more recent Qt (5.8) and the latest KF5 frameworks for Windows bringing more features and stability.

This release brings in many bugs fixes, enhancements for limited-resources devices, and improvements, especially to KStars premier astrophotography tool: Ekos. Windows users would be glad to learn that they can now use offline astrometry solver in Windows, thanks to the efforts of the ANSVR Local Astrometry.net solver. The ANSVR mimics the astrometry.net online server on your local computer; thus the internet not required for any astrometry queries.

After installing the ANSVR server and downloading the appropriate index files for your setup, you can simply change the API URL to use the ANSVR server as illustrated below:

In Ekos align module, keep the solver type to Online so it would use the local ANSVR server for all astrometry queries. Then you can use the align module as you would normally do. This release also features the Ekos Polar Alignment Assistant tool, a very easy to use spot-on tool to polar align your mount.

Clear skies!

Ekos Polar Alignment Assistant Tool

When setting up a German Equatorial Mount (GEM) for imaging, a critical aspect of capturing long-exposure images is to ensure a proper polar alignment. A GEM mount has two axis: Right Ascension (RA) axis and Declination (DE) axis. Ideally, the RA axis should be aligned with the celestial sphere polar axis. A mount's job is to track the stars motion around the sky, from the moment they rise at the eastern horizon, all the way up across the median, and westward until they set.

In long exposure imaging, a camera is attached to the telescope where the image sensor captures incoming photons from a particular area in the sky. The incident photons have to strike the same photo-site over and over again if we are to gather clear and crisp image. Of course, actual photons do not behave in this way: optics, atmosphere, seeing quality all scatter and refract photons in one way or another. Furthermore, photons do not arrive uniformly but follow a Poisson distribution. For point-like sources like stars, a point spread function describes how photons are spatially distributed across the pixels. Nevertheless, the overall idea we want to keep the source photons hitting the same pixels. Otherwise, we might end up with an image plagued with various trail artifacts.

Since mounts are not perfect, they cannot perfectly keep track of object as it transits across the sky. This can stem from many factors, one of which is the mis-alignment of the mount's Right Ascension axis with respect to the celestial pole axis. Polar alignment removes one of the biggest sources of tracking errors in the mount, but other sources of error still play a factor. If properly aligned, some mounts can track an object for a few minutes with only deviation of 1-2 arcsec RMS.

However, unless you have a fancy top of the line mount, then you'd probably want to use an autoguider to keep the same star locked in the same position over time. Despite all of this, if the axis of the mount is not properly aligned with the celestial pole, then even a mechanically-perfect mount would lose tracking with time. Tracking errors are proportional to the magnitude of the misalignment. It is therefore very important for long exposure imaging to get the mount polar aligned to reduce any residual errors as it spans across the sky.

Several polar-alignment aids exist today, including, but not limited to:

1. Polar scope built-in your mount.
2. Using drift alignment from applications like PHD2.
3. Dedicated hardware like QHY's PoleMaster.
4. Ekos Legacy Polar Alignment tool: You need to take exposure of two different points in the sky to measure the drift and find out polar error in each axis (Altitude & Azimuth)
5. SharpCap Polar Alignment tool.

Out of the above, the easiest to use are probably QHY's PoleMaster and SharpCap's Polar alignment tool. However both software are exclusive to Windows OS only. KStars users have long requested support for an easy to use Polar Alignment helper in Ekos leveraging its astrometry.net backend.

During the last couple of weeks, I worked on developing Ekos Polar Alignment Assistant Tool (PAA). I started with a simple mathematical model consisting of two images rotated by a an arbitrary degree. A sample illustration of this is below:

Given two points, we can calculate the arc length from the rotation angle, and hence the radius. Therefore, it is possible to find two circle solutions that would match this, one of which would be the mount's actual RA axis within the image. Finding out which solution is the correct one turned out to be challenging, and even the mount's own rotation angle cannot be fully trusted. To be able to uniquely draw a circle, you need 3 points. So it was suggested by Gerry Rozema, one of INDI venerable developers, to capture 3 images to uniquely identify the circle without involving a lot of fancy math.

Since it relies on astrometry.net, PAA has more relaxed requirements than other tools making it accessible to more users. You can use your own primary or guide camera, given they have wide-enough FOV for the astrometry solver.

Moreover, the assistant can automatically capture, solve, and even rotate the mount for you. All you have to do is to make the necessary adjustments to your mount.

The new PAA works by capturing and solving three images. It is technically possible to rely on two images only as described above, but three images improves the accuracy of the solution. After capturing each, the mount rotates by a fixed amount and another image is captured and solved.

Since the mount's true RA/DE are resolved by astrometry, we can construct a unique circle from the three centers found in the astrometry solutions. The circle's center is where the mount rotates about (RA Axis) and ideally this point should coincide with the celestial pole. However, if there is a mis-alignment, then Ekos draws a correction vector. This correction vector can be placed anywhere in the image. Next the user refreshes the camera feed and applies correction to the mount's Altitude and Azimuth knobs until the star is located in the designated cross-hair. It's that easy!

Ekos PAA is now in Beta and tests/feedback are highly appreciated.

New Supernovae Data Source in KStars!

The initial support for Supernovae in KStars was added back in 2011, but it relied on parsing an HTML page using a Python script to extract the necessary information on the latest discovered supernovae. It was obviously a very crude and hackish way to get the data, and I longed to rely on a better source for our data.

The Harvard page we were relying on for supernovae updates suddenly stopped posting any further updates, its last update was made in 2015. Thankfully, we discovered a new gold trove of information: The Open Supernovae Catalog project!

Every small orange dot is a supernova!

Before this project was created, the state of open and accessible data for supernovae was severely lacking in the astronomical community. Thanks to the Open Supernova Catalog, KStars is now again properly displaying old and newly discovered supernovae across the cosmos! The data is available by a JSON file that includes the supernova metadata required in KStars. It can be updated by the user from the data menu.

I'd like to especially thank Dr. James Guillochon, an an ITC Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, for his excellent support to make Supernovae in KStars possible!

KStars 2.7.2 for Windows is released

Less than a month from the release 2.7.0, KStars v2.7.2 for Windows 64bit is now available for download on KStars website! Get it now and give it a go.

The new release features many minor improvements and bug fixes including very fast startup time (about 300% faster) in addition to more streamlined Ekos GUI for capture and schedule modules. Images captured with Ekos on Windows would now conform to legal filenames in Windows when using ISO 8061 time stamped files.

Unfortunately, a few problems remain in this release most importantly is that KStars does not gracefully closes, it always remains in the background and must be terminated explicitly by the Windows task manager. This bug was supposed to be fixed by Qt 5.8 but alas it is still affecting Qt 5.8 in emerge. Once fixed by Qt/KDE, we shall make another release addressing this issue. 

Multiple notifications across multiple monitors in KDE Plasma 5?

I have 3 monitors, and on each monitor, I have a Plasma panel at the bottom. When any notification pops up, I get 3 notifications on each monitor. I have a full fledged panel on each monitor with everything including task bar and system tray.

As you can imagine, this can get annoying pretty fast. Thanks to IRC and Bhushan Shah who proposed this solution, simply remove the system tray from the panels on the secondary monitors, and just keep the system tray on the primary monitor. This way, you will only get one-notification popup on each monitor instead of multiple ones!

To achieve this, first click on the hamburger icon in the panel to edit the panel. Then hover the mount over the system tray area where you get a popup like below that enables you to remove the system tray plasmoid.

KStars Lite 1.0.0 is released on Google Play!

A couple of days after the release of KStars 2.7, the KStars team is happy to announce the availability of KStars Lite for Android, now available on the Google Play Store.

KStars Lite is our successful Google Summer of Code project for 2016. It was developed by our star student and active developer Artem Fedoskin who managed within a few months to create a QML/QtQuick lite version of desktop KStars with many features including:

Full Skymap

A beautiful sky map that takes you into deep space to see stars, planets, galaxies, and much more:

1. All Solar System Objects
2. Constellation Art
3. Constellation Boundary Lines, Lines, Names
4. Equatorial Coordinate System
5. Horizontal Coordinate System
6. Deep Sky Objects
7. Stars and Deep Stars
8. Ecliptic, Equator and Horizon
9. Milky Way
10. Satellites
11. Supernovae
12. Labels

GPS-Based Location

While you can select your location from the thousands of cities shipped with KStars Lite, you can also simply ask it to automatically fill that information and it would fetch your location within a few seconds!

This feature is very handy when you're on the field and want to see an accurate representation of the night sky form your current location.

KStars Lite fetches not only longitude and latitude information, but also geographic information about your current location (city, state, country) via Google services.

Color Schemes

Similar to the desktop KStars version, KStars Lite support setting of several color schemes.

Most notable is the Night Vision scheme that enable your eyes to adjust to the darkness while still being able to utilize the sky map fully without any blazing glares that could ruin your night vision.

Projection Systems

Select from various projection systems. A projection system is used to map 3D space into your 2D screen, and there are many ways to do it including:

1. Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection.
2. Azimuthal equidistant projection.
3. Orthographic projection.
4. Equirectangular projection.
5. Stereographic projection.
6. Gnomonic projection.

Find Any Object

KStars Lite provides you with a convenient search functionality to search within KStars catalogs that includes thousands of stars, galaxies, nebulae, and solar system objects. When an object is found, you can go to the object on the sky map or view detailed information about it.

But what if the object is not found within KStars database? Do not worry! KStars include functionality to search numerous online catalogs for millions of objects. Once found, the KStars database downloads the new object data, and includes the new object just like a regular KStars object where you can view its information, center it...etc

Detailed Object Info

Explore detailed object information provided by KStars Lite. This includes images, position and time information, and links to pursue further information on the object.

Want to know when the project will pass overhead? Check the position tab. Want to see more images of the object? Check the links tab. Have some notes to write about the object? Save them in the logs tab.

The general tab includes the most prominent information about an object such as its magnitude, its distance from earth, and its angular size in the sky.

Full INDI Client Support

Control your Telescope, CCD, DSLR, and even your complete observatory within KStars Lite. With its first class INDI client support, you can connect to an INDI server running your equipment, and start controlling them immediately.

You can track your telescope motion on the sky map, and even select any object and ask the telescope to track it. Have a camera attached to your telescope? Simply capture an image and get a live preview on KStars Lite!

No need to fiddle with cables and wires anymore, use KStars Lite to wirelessly control your astronomy equipment at any time and from any where.

What's next?

Please bear in mind this is our first KStars Lite release for Android, and while we worked hard to fix some of the quirks in the development version, there is still room for improvements including improving its stability and performance:

1. Reduce startup time: Currently it takes about ~35 seconds for KStars Lite to startup (on my Samsung S5) which is a very long time compared to what users typically expect on Android. We will be working hard to reduce this startup time to an acceptable range.
2. Adjust sky map to follow gyroscopic sensors: We eventually expect users to point their phone/table to any location on the sky, the KStars Lite would then adjust the sky map to show this particular region of the sky. There were several issues with using Qt Sensors that prevented this feature from making it into the initial release, but we are working on it.
3. Ekos support: We might include some of the modules of Ekos in the Lite release.