A Desktop Planetarium for KDE
Important Note: Do not submit Pull Requests to Github. KStars repository on Github is just a mirror. All PRs will be closed automatically. To send patches to KStars, please use KDE's Phabricator system.
KStars is free, open source, cross-platform Astronomy Software.
It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes up to 100 million stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects,all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets, asteroids, supernovae, and satellites.
For students and teachers, it supports adjustable simulation speeds in order to view phenomena that happen over long timescales, the KStars Astrocalculator to predict conjunctions, and many common astronomical calculations. For the amateur astronomer, it provides an observation planner, a sky calendar tool, and an FOV editor to calculate field of view of equipment and display them. Find out interesting objects in the "What's up Tonight" tool, plot altitude vs. time graphs for any object, print high-quality sky charts, and gain access to lots of information and resources to help you explore the universe!
Included with KStars is Ekos astrophotography suite, a complete astrophotography solution that can control all INDI devices including numerous telescopes, CCDs, DSLRs, focusers, filters, and a lot more. Ekos supports highly accurate tracking using online and offline astrometry solver, autofocus and autoguiding capabilities, and capture of single or multiple images using the powerful built in sequence manager.
Copyright
Copyright (c) 2001 - 2020 by The KStars Team:
KStars is Free Software, released under the GNU Public License. See COPYING for GPL license information.
Downloads
KStars is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. You can download the latest version from KStars official website.
On Linux, it is available for most Linux distributions.
Latest stable version is v3.3.8
Important URLs and files.
KStars documentation
The KStars handbook can be found in your $(KDEDIR)/share/doc/HTML//kstars/
directory. You can also easily access it from the Help menu, or by pressing
the [F1] key, or by visiting https://docs.kde.org/?application=kstars
In addition, there are the following README files:
README: This file; general information
README.planetmath: Explanation of algorithms used to compute planet positions
README.customize: Advanced customization options
README.images: Copyright information for images used in KStars.
README.i18n: Instructions for translators
Credits
The KStars Team
Main contributors:
Jason Harris kstars@30doradus.org
Jasem Mutlaq mutlaqja@ikarustech.com
Akarsh Simha akarsh.simha@kdemail.net
James Bowlin bowlin@mindspring.com
Heiko Evermann heiko@evermann.de
Thomas Kabelmann tk78@gmx.de
Pablo de Vicente pvicentea@wanadoo.es
Mark Hollomon mhh@mindspring.com
Carsten Niehaus cniehaus@kde.org
Médéric Boquien mboquien@free.fr
Alexey Khudyakov alexey.skladnoy@gmail.com
Jérôme Sonrier jsid@emor3j.fr.eu.org
Harry de Valence hdevalence@gmail.com
Victor Carbune victor.carbune@kdemail.net
Rafał Kułaga rl.kulaga@gmail.com
Samikshan Bairagya samikshan@gmail.com
Rishab Arora ra.rishab@gmail.com
Robert Lancaster rlancaste@gmail.com
Data Sources:
Most of the catalog data came from the Astronomical Data Center, run by
NASA. The website is:
http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/
NGC/IC data is compiled by Christian Dersch from OpenNGC database.
https://github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC
Check LICENSE_OpenNGC for license details (CC-BY-SA-4.0)
Supernovae data is from the Open Supernova Catalog project at https://sne.space
Please refer to the published paper here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016arXiv160501054G
KStars links to the excellent image collections and HTML pages put together
by the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, at:
http://www.seds.org
KStars links to the online Digitized Sky Survey images, which you can
query at:
http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form
KStars links to images from the HST Heritage project, and from HST
press releases:
http://heritage.stsci.edu
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr.html
KStars links to images from the Advanced Observer Program at
Kitt Peak National Observatory. If you are interested in astrophotography,
you might consider checking out their program:
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/
Credits for each image used in the program are listed in README.images
Acknowledgements
KStars is a labor of love. It started as a personal hobby of mine, but
very soon after I first posted the code on Sourceforge, it started to
attract other developers. I am just completely impressed and gratified
by my co-developers. I couldn't ask for a more talented, friendly crew.
It goes without saying that KStars would be nowhere near what it is today
without their efforts. Together, we've made something we can all be
proud of.
We used (primarily) two books as a guide in writing the algorithms used
in KStars:
- "Practical Astronomy With Your Calculator" by Peter Duffett-Smith
- "Astronomical Algorithms" by Jean Meeus
Thanks to the developers of Qt and KDE whose peerless API made KStars
possible. Thanks also to the tireless efforts of the KDE translation
teams, who bring KStars to a global audience.
Thanks to everyone at the KDevelop message boards and on irc.kde.org,
for answering my frequent questions.
Thanks also to the many users who have submitted bug reports or other
feedback.
You're still reading this? :)
Well, that's about it. I hope you enjoy KStars!
Jason Harris
kstars@30doradus.org
KStars Development Mailing list
kstars-devel@kde.org
Send us ideas and feedback!
