README for Konstellation version 0.1


Konstellation is a simple KDE based application to display the 9000 brightest
stars (taken from the Bright Star Catalogue).
It consists of a scrollable view, and two sliders, labelled as Mag. and Zoom.
The Zoom slider is used to zoom in and out, and a statusbar display shows the
current zoom level.
The Mag. slider is used to select only stars below a certain magnitude (from
7.0-0.0 in decrements of 0.5) and again a statusbar display shows the
currently selected minimum magnitude.


Pressing the left mouse button within the scrollable view will tell you the
R.A and Declination at that point on the map.
Pressing the middle mouse button within the scrollable view will centre the
display on that point (or as near as it can in the case of items on the edges).
Pressing the right mouse button when over a star will bring a popup menu,
which contains two options. "Detail" will show the information held on that
star in the database, and "Connect" will perform connect a star to another (to
allow you to define constellations). To connect two stars, pick a star, and
select "Connect", then pick the second and again press "Connect". To undo the
last connect made you can select "Undo" from the main "File" menu.


The Statusbar shows, in order from left to right :-

R.A and DEC of last left button click.
Zoom Level
Magnitude
Number of Stars selected
R.A and DEC of top left hand corner of visible view area
connected star status.


The database I am using is Interbase 4, which can be downloaded for free from
http://www.interbase.com/downloads/summaries/19.html, and is called astro.gdb.
Okay, so it's not a open source database, but it is fast and full featured and
I've used it on other projects (mainly because it allows dynamic SQL which I
have not found yet in any open source database). If anyone wants to port to
another database, then the pop.e (conversion source), astro.gdl (interbase
gdef database creation script) and BrightStar.txt (actual star data) may be
useful.


Sorry, no autoconfig yet. I only have a mak file that can be executed to build
the application.
Sorry also, you have to (in this initial version) run the program from the same
directory that it was build in (and that the database resides in).


Many things need to be done especially creating new views. Anyone interested
in doing this should look at FullMap.cc and mapView.cc. mapView is an abstract
class that you should derive any new views from, and then implement the
drawMap method. I'd appreciate the classes that anyone does.
At present if you select the "Full Map" option from the "View" menu, it blanks
the scrollable view for some reason. However, as there is but one view at
present I wasn't too worried.
I'd like to change the Stars.e code and convert it into a class rather
than just some external C code.
I will be adding a list of Messier objects (and will try to insert blobs into
the database so that I can store pictures of these objects). I have the file
in place, just not decided what else I may want to store. I will also try to
get a listing of the NGC catalogue so as to add these objects as well.
I also have plans to allow extra data to be added by users. None of
the catalogue I found contained absolute magnitude, distance in l/y or star
names, so I will be adding these options (with the ability to pass these
changes to other users).


My own system configuration is S.u.S.E 6.0 with a 2.2.9 kernel, QT 1.44 and KDE 1.1.1. If yours matches then you should be able to simply run Konst, else you will have to execute my ./mak file.


Any comments, suggestions, to

Mark W J Redding
<grawlfang@tesco.net>

