Friday, April 27, 2018
The Simple Way Redux: KStars
If you’ve been reading these little epistles for a while,
you know I one of my uses for planetarium software—programs that create a
graphic representation of the sky on your desktop—is to send my goto telescope mounts
on their gotos. When I am imaging, anyway. It’s nice to be able to sit at the
laptop with the camera control software running and send the scope to its next
target with a mouse-click. No getting up and walking out to the scope (which is
set up in the yard while I operate from the deck) to fool with the hand controller. But I do have another use
for planetariums, one that’s just as important.
My other use for Cartes du Ciel, Stellarium, and the
rest is for quick reference. I want to know what’s going be up at 8 p.m. Or I’m
writing a magazine article and need to find out where faint fuzzy number one is
located in regard to faint fuzzy number two. Sometimes I need the objects’s
basic statistics: the spectral type of a particular star, the magnitude of a
cluster, the Hubble type of a galaxy; you get the picture.
For most of my indoor use, I do not need a soft with ten zillion stars and galaxies in its
database. I need a program that is, most of all, quick to launch. If a soft
takes more than 15 – 20 seconds to start, I become annoyed. I just wanna see
when Orion’s gonna be up good and high, and I don't want to wait all freaking day to
find out. So what do I use?
Let’s turn the clock back, way back (well, relatively speaking) to the early 1990s. The first
truly useful astronomy program I encountered is still one of the best for quick
reference—or would be if you could get the DOS based SkyGlobe 3.6 to run on a
post-Windows XP machine. Skyglobe was, above all, fast, blazingly fast, to load even on my old 486 (don’t ask, kids).
I was still using it when my Toshiba satellite running XP finally gave up the
ghost.
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After that? I foundered and floundered for a while. Cartes
du Ciel is a wonderful program. It’s free, but nevertheless is still one of the
greatest astro-softs to ever to be published. Problems with it? While it’s its GUI has gotten a little fancier over the years, it’s still pretty old fashioned in
that regard. And the graphics, its depiction of the sky, are old school for
sure. More Skyglobe than TheSky X. That last is not a huge problem for my use,
but I still like a pretty display, I must admit. CdC is certainly quick to load, too, if not
Skyglobe fast. In about 15 seconds max it is ready to roll on my middle of the
road desktop.
I was happy with CdC for a long time. It was basically all I used day in and day out for everything, including for indoor reference, sending my Celestron mounts on gotos, and serving as a front end for EQMOD. I doubt I'll ever stop using Cartes. It simply does some things no other freeware soft does. Just because CdC is a good thing, however, that doesn't mean it is the only thing.
One day I discovered Stellarium. It was just so pretty. And was every bit as fast to load as Cartes du Ciel. Moreover, its drag-the-sky-with-the-mouse trope was so smooth and fast that it was love at first sight. The same went for most of the rest of its GUI. I loved Stellarium, and once hailed it as “the new Skyglobe.”
One day I discovered Stellarium. It was just so pretty. And was every bit as fast to load as Cartes du Ciel. Moreover, its drag-the-sky-with-the-mouse trope was so smooth and fast that it was love at first sight. The same went for most of the rest of its GUI. I loved Stellarium, and once hailed it as “the new Skyglobe.”
Alas, there’s this thing called “feature creep.” Stellarium
has grown up, and, like a lot of us, in middle age it’s grown out, too. It has put on a few pounds
virtually speaking. Even if I don’t turn on much of its extensive (and amazing)
feature set, the current release has me tapping my fingers as it loads up—it
now takes as long as 30-seconds (like many programs, it’s faster if you’ve
recently run it). That may not sound long for you, but it's an eternity for your
impatient Uncle Rod when he’s got a hot observing idea or an inspiration as to
a target to add to an observing article.
Then, I happened to read a post on everybody’s fave
astro-BBS, Cloudy Nights. A post about a program I hadn’t heard about in a
long time, KStars. If you, like me, once fooled around with Linux, even for a
little while, the program's name is probably familiar. It was one of the (few) serious
astronomy apps for that operating system when I was going through my Linux phase. Reading the post on CN, I was surprised to
learn the program is not only still around, it is still being
developed. There is now a version for, believe it or not, Windows 10. Huh! From
running it on Linux (under the K desktop, natch) I remembered it as small and
fast and thought I’d give the Win version a try.
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Installing KStars is simplicity itself; simply download it
(here), and double click the install file when Windows (or Linux or OSX)
finishes. Installation is automatic with no unzipping or anything like that
required.
Installation complete, I clicked on the program’s icon (which I had to send to the desktop manually; it wasn’t placed there automatically) and got out my stopwatch. In less than 10-seconds the program was up and prompting me to begin set up. Which was also painless. About all KStars needed to know from me was my location. You can enter latitude and longitude manually, or just click on a city from KStars long list. After that, all that remains is the additional files window.
Installation complete, I clicked on the program’s icon (which I had to send to the desktop manually; it wasn’t placed there automatically) and got out my stopwatch. In less than 10-seconds the program was up and prompting me to begin set up. Which was also painless. About all KStars needed to know from me was my location. You can enter latitude and longitude manually, or just click on a city from KStars long list. After that, all that remains is the additional files window.
Like most modern programs, KStar offers an extensive set of
supplemental object catalogs and image files. You can have millions of stars
and deep sky objects if you wish. Me? I didn’t wish. In the interest of keeping
the program small and quick, I only downloaded one additional item, thumbnail
type images of the NGC objects for display in the information window that can
be displayed for deep sky objects. If you should change your mind about
additional files, it’s easy to run the installation wizard again later and add or remove files as desired.
What was my first impression of KStars? “Pretty enough. The
display ain’t as attractive as Stellarium’s but looks more modern than that of
Cartes du Ciel.” Experimentally clicking and dragging the sky around to change
my view yielded good results. It was every bit as smooth as this function is in
Stellarium. I did note dimmer stars and DSOs are erased during a
drag—presumably to speed things up (Stellarium doesn’t do that).
Like other planetarium programs, the next step is to turn
on/off features you want or don’t want. With KStars, that mostly involved
turning on the constellation lines and setting up labels and their densities
(numbers) for constellations, stars, and deep sky objects. When I had the
program looking he way I like, I did a little playing around to get the lay of
the land.
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First thing, I picked a DSO, good, old M81, and clicked on
it. I wanted to see what sort of data KStars would yield about targets. To do
that, right click on an object and select “details” from the menu that appears.
What I got is shown above, which is not much. The galaxy’s Hubble type isn’t
even given. All there is is
magnitude, position, size, and alternate designations. That’s the bad. The good is that
clicking the "links" and “advanced” tabs brings up hyperlinks to web pages concerning the
object, and to resources like NED, the NASA Extragalactic database. Unfortunately, I was
disappointed to find that many of the web page hyperlinks in the details window are dead links. Moreover, even if the URLs all worked, I would
like a little more info on objects in the program itself. Both Stellarium and
Cartes du Ciel do much better here.
One of the things I do most frequently when writing about
deep sky objects, is, as previously mentioned, describe their positions in terms
of their distance from another object in angular degrees and position angle with
regard to that other object, “M78 is 2-degrees 30’ northeast of Alnitak.”
Alas, while you can engage an angular separation mode that measures
the separation of two objects when you draw a line between the two with the
mouse, KStars only gives separation, not position angle as well like most other
programs do.
At first, I thought that was it for KStars. Knowing both separation and position angle is
important for me. Then, I discovered KStars’ astronomical calculator. One of
the many functions it performs is determining the separation and angle of two objects. It’s easy to select objects from a list, and a
push of a button then gives both angular distance and
position angle. Frankly, I found this easier (and more precise) than using a
mouse.
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Otherwise, what’s the program like? Oh, it’s fairly basic
stuff. It has some built-in pictures for the more prominent objects displayed
on the charts. Various reticles (like a Telrad) can be overlaid on the maps. A
red night vision mode can be engaged. Unlike Stellarium, you can print charts
(if not very good looking ones). There’s even telescope control. Alas, that’s
via INDI, not ASCOM. I don’t know that I’ll fooling around with that, but I
don’t really intend to use KStars on the observing field, anyway.
So, to sum up? It’s a useable program for just about
anything. Is there a reason or reasons to use KStars instead of the big two
freeware planetariums? Yes. If you, like me, need fast. Or you need small. Or
maybe hardware constraints dictate you need both, you could do worse.
Much as I
miss good old Skyglobe, I must admit humble KStars just blows its doors off. And that's good. But. Will I use it? How much will I use it. That remains to be
seen. I like KStars, but I’ll admit it’s gonna be hard to make myself stop
using those old reliables CdC and Stellarium. Stay tuned.
Comments:
Review of KStars with no mention of Ekos -- the feature they have spent the most time on? I get that you dont use INDI and that is fair, but Ekos is just like SGP and a very big part of the software package.
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Stellarium and Cartes du Ciel (especially if you partner it with the now free Deepsky live on my laptop. You want fast, well there is only one way to get fast my friend. Try at least an 8 core, 32 gig Ram and an 8 gig GPU.
Seriously even on my refurb astro only i5 3200 mhrz with 8 gig of ram but a good SSD laptop these programs are really fast.
Using TeamViewer and these two computers everything is fast, I mean really fast. Deepsky and Cartes du Ciel never leave me wanting on these machines even over Teamviewer.
Since I live in an ASCOM world both drive the scope after its align and running. Now that I have to switch between the C8 & ES102 I'm keeping software I know and that do it all. Seriously Cartes du Ciel, Moon Atlas, and Deepsky - all free and working together = are fast on the right machines(s):)
BTW since you infected me with refracter fever beside the 102 I picked up an old ST80 with GSO 2" for my SLT scope.
Glad to see the Blog has risen again (I guess its period is somewhat random:).
Seriously even on my refurb astro only i5 3200 mhrz with 8 gig of ram but a good SSD laptop these programs are really fast.
Using TeamViewer and these two computers everything is fast, I mean really fast. Deepsky and Cartes du Ciel never leave me wanting on these machines even over Teamviewer.
Since I live in an ASCOM world both drive the scope after its align and running. Now that I have to switch between the C8 & ES102 I'm keeping software I know and that do it all. Seriously Cartes du Ciel, Moon Atlas, and Deepsky - all free and working together = are fast on the right machines(s):)
BTW since you infected me with refracter fever beside the 102 I picked up an old ST80 with GSO 2" for my SLT scope.
Glad to see the Blog has risen again (I guess its period is somewhat random:).
This is such an informative post. You have a lot of really great points. I wish I had this post as a resource when I started blogging.
Telescope Price in UAE .
Telescope Price in UAE .
Skyglobe 3.6 seems to run pretty well inside DosBox, there's a version that runs inside a browser here. Functionality wise I'm sure the modern programs have a leg up, but it may be useful for nostalgia or quick reference purposes.
https://archive.org/details/SkyGlobe_1020
https://archive.org/details/SkyGlobe_1020
# posted by 
: 12:15 PM
: 12:15 PM Review of KStars with no mention of Ekos -- the feature they have spent the most time on? I get that you dont use INDI and that is fair, but Ekos is just like SGP and a very big part of the software package.
# posted by : 3:00 AM
: 3:00 AM
Hi Guys,
I am new to stargazing can you tell me if this site is any good and the recommendation it makes, i'm in the hunt for a new scope.
Thanks
the link is
http://www.stargazingtelescope.com
I am new to stargazing can you tell me if this site is any good and the recommendation it makes, i'm in the hunt for a new scope.
Thanks
the link is
http://www.stargazingtelescope.com
The most distinguishing feature of KStars is Ekos and it's not mentioned at all. But great review overall.
# posted by : 5:42 AM
: 5:42 AM
I tried KStars for Windows and found it unquestionably the poorest of the freeware star charts, ever. The telescope interface is a bad joke. When I tried to use the "uninstall" feature it failed, and I had to do "hard drive magic" to remove it, and to edit the Windows registry. This I consider a TERRIBLE bug and am warning people NOT to put it on a system unless they are prepared for trouble.
# posted by : 12:49 AM
: 12:49 AM
Great post. Articles that have meaningful and insightful comments are more enjoyable, at least to me. It’s interesting to read what other people thought and how it relates to them or their clients, as their perspective could possibly help you in the future.
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There's always something great to watch with Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. Choose from popular movies and full seasons of hit TV shows. Enjoy a wide variety of choices, including Action & Adventure, Comedy, Kids & Family, Documentaries, and more. Plus, there are never any commercials.
While seeing generally, if you are looking for more content and entertainment, you can go for Hotstar. If you are always exploring something new to watch, you can go for Netflix. If you want to have the common ground between this two, you can opt for amazon prime.
Regards
www.netflix.com/activate
www.netflix.com/activate
www.office.com/setup 2016
www.office.com/setup
microsoft365.com/setup
www.office.com/setup
www.office.com/setup
microsoft365.com/setup
www.netflix.com/activate
www.netflix.com/activate
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