KStars/Embedded: The Universe, in your hands!

KStars has been ported to the Qtopia palmtop computing environment! The port is based on the Kstars-0.8.5 release, and it was done entirely by Sébastien Prud'homme; we just received his tarball out of the blue. Thanks, Sébastien!

Unfortunately, Sébastien has informed us that the port isn't really usable on a PDA at this time. He developed it using a Qtopia emulator on a desktop computer. The problem appears to be that the memory and CPU requirements are much too high. I have some suggestions for how to make KStars more PDA-friendly:

• remove the messier images, and maybe planet images too.
• remove most of the stars catalog (you could cut it down to 6000 stars by stopping at 6th magnitude, the naked-eye limit)
• remove the IC catalog, and maybe NGC too (if needed)
• remove the milky way, or at least reduce its number of points.
• remove the coordinate grid, or reduce its number of points.
• remove the lower zoom settings, so that thousands of objects cannot be displayed at one time
• use simplified planet position calculations?

I'm too busy developing regular KStars at the moment to give this a look; if you'd like to give it a shot, you can download KStars/E here.

Here are some screenshots. It looks really cool, I hope it will be usable soon!

Jason Harris kstars@30doradus.org