Akarsh Simha is pursuing a very ambitious project for Google Summer of Code 2008: He's increasing the number of stars displayed by KStars by a factor of 10 (from 130,000 to over 1 million), without having a negative impact on the performance of the program. James Bowlin and I are his co-mentors in this project. James and Akarsh spent the pre-coding SoC period hashing out the code architecture required for this effort, which allowed Akarsh to hit the ground running when he started to code.

I'd like to introduce Akarsh Simha, who was awarded a GSoC this year to work on KStars. His project is entitled "Optimising loading and painting of stars in KStars", and when it is successfully completed, KStars will finally have the ability to display millions of stars, without adversely affecting the programs interactive responsiveness.

I need help on some things which ought to be trivial. I'm working on the KStars Observing List tool, depicted here:

Ain't it pretty? The first trouble arises if the TableView listing the objects loses input focus. Then it looks like this:

Do you want to help improve KStars, but don't want to do programming or debugging? Do you like pretty pictures?

Over at the KStars Community Forums, I have announced the KStars Image Challenge. We need more pictures of celestial objects for our Details window. Right now we have most of the Messier objects and about 40 NGC objects; you can see the current images here: http://www.30doradus.org/kstars/detail_thumbs/

As blogged by Bart Coppens, there's currently a naked-eye comet gracing northern-hemisphere skies: comet Holmes. It's in KStars, but you should update the ephemerides with Get New Stuff (Ctrl+D), or the position will be way off. Here's a screenie showing its position as of tonight:

Once again, there's a wonderful treat for people who want to take a look outside at night. Less than a year ago, I was pleasantly surprised to be able to see comet McNaught with the naked eye. This time, it is comet Holmes giving us a surprise show by suddenly brightening! More details are all over the net, like here.

Just like last time, the weather in Belgium sucked these past few days. Today the clouds finally opened somewhat at night (not completely, but still), so it was only a few moments ago that I was able to have a real look. And I was once again not disappointed at all. I was able to see the little fuzzy bulb with the naked eye just fine. Looking at it through binoculars is pretty amazing, even though it does look more like a blob rather than the stereotypical head-with-long-tail. If you're near the northern hemisphere, you might want to try and have a look as well.

As for the final KDE-hook: it appears the comet is also findable in everybody's favourite KDE-Edu application KStars, so if you can't figure out where the comet can be found by use of the sky charts in the above links, you could try to find it using KStars

Howdy KStars fans,

Just a quick note to let you know that we are now in BugKill mode: no more new features for 4.0, just polishing and bugfixes. Here's what KStars looks like these days:

With Qt-4.2, we finally get back the flexbility of adding arbitrary widgets to action containers like toolbars and menus, via the new QWidgetAction class. For QToolbar, there was already a workaround for this in the addWidget() function, but there was no way to add a widget to a menu.

One of our users suggested that it would be useful to have some mechanism by which members of the KStars user community could meet and interact, either a mailing list or a web forum. I totally agree. I know there are many people using KStars, and there are lots of reasons that they would want a way to talk with each other, share custom content that they've made, rant about their most hated bugs, whatever.

I've spent the last few months on the behind-the-scenes architecture of KStars. Since the port to KDE4 was going to be a major overhaul for us anyway, we decided to simultaneously do a major refactoring of how the data catalogs are represented in KStars. We're now using a hierarchical Composite/Component model, and it's working well.

Once that was nailed down, I began the dull drudgework of porting to KDE4. It was mostly search-and-replace, followed by bug hunting. Class by class, I replaced QPtrLists with QLists, for(Iterator)'s with foreach()'s, and QPoints with QPointFs (to name a few).

All of that effort was in service of a dream: of seeing, for the first time, my beloved KStars rendered in full antialiased glory. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: KStars under KDE4: