The StellarMate Plus Manual
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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.
Introduction
KStars lets you explore the night sky from the comfort of your computer chair. It
provides an accurate graphical representation of the night sky for any date, from
any location on Earth. The display includes 126,000 stars to 9th magnitude (100
million with addon catalogs), 13,000 deep-sky objects (Messier, NGC, and IC
catalogs), all planets, the Sun and Moon, hundreds of comets and asteroids, the
Milky Way, 88 constellations, and guide lines such as the celestial equator,
the horizon and the ecliptic.
However, KStars is more than a simple night-sky simulator. The display provides
a compelling interface to a number of tools with which you can learn more about
astronomy and the night sky. There is a context-sensitive popup menu attached
to each displayed object, which displays object-specific information and actions.
Hundreds of objects provide links in their popup menus to informative web pages
and beautiful images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and other
observatories.
From an object's popup menu, you can open its Detailed Information Window,
where you can examine positional data about the object, and query a huge
treasury of online databases for professional-grade astronomical data and
literature references about the object. You can even attach your own Internet
links, images and text notes, making KStars a graphical front-end to your
observing logs and your personal astronomical notebook.
Our Astrocalculator tool provides direct access to many of the algorithms the
program uses behind the scenes, including coordinate converters and time
calculators.
You can plan an observing session using our Altitude vs. Time tool, which will plot
curves representing the Altitude as a function of time for any group of objects. If
that is too much detail, we also provide a What's Up Tonight? tool that
summarizes the objects that you will be able to see from your location on any
given night. You can add your favorite objects to your observing wish-list using
the Observation Planner tool, which allows you to plan your observation sessions
professionally. To see how object appears in the eyepiece under different
telescopes and field of views, use the Simulate Eyepiece View tool to render a
simulated view of what you see.
KStars also provides a Solar System Viewer, which shows the current
configuration of the major planets in our solar system. There is also a Jupiter
Moons Tool which shows the positions of Jupiter's four largest moons as a
function of time.
Our primary goal is to make KStars an interactive educational tool for learning
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