The StellarMate Plus Manual
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about astronomy and the night sky. To this end, the KStars Handbook includes
the AstroInfo Project, a series of short, hyperlinked articles on astronomical
topics that can be explored with KStars. In addition, KStars includes D-
Bus functions that allow you to write complex scripts, making KStars a powerful
"demo engine" for classroom use or general illustration of astronomical topics.
Furthermore, any 3rd party tool or language with support of D-Bus can be used
to write powerful scripts using KStars D-Bus API
Enable HiPS all-sky progressive overlay to fetch high-resolution images and
display them directly in the sky map. You can select from numerous catalogs
compiled from different earth and space based missions. This features requires a
fast internet connection in order to download the images. The images are cached
locally to reduce bandwidth. You can optimize the caching options to best
balance between disk space versus bandwidth.
However, KStars is not just for students. You can control telescopes and cameras
with KStars, using the elegant and powerful INDI protocol. KStars supports
several popular telescopes including Meade's LX200 family and Celestron GPS.
Several popular CCD cameras, webcams, and computerized focusers are also
supported. Simple slew/track commands are integrated directly into the main
window's popup menu, and the INDI Control Panel provides full access to all of
your telescope's functions. INDI's Client/Server architecture allows for seamless
control of any number of local or remote telescopes using a
single KStars session.For advanced users, KStars provides Ekos, a complete
astrophotography suite for Linux. Ekos is based on a modular extensible
framework to perform common astrophotography tasks. This includes highly
accurate GOTOs using astrometry solver, ability to measure and correct polar
alignment errors , auto-focus and auto-guide capabilities, and capture of single or
stack of images with filter wheel support.
We are very interested in your feedback; please report bugs or feature requests
to the KStars development mailing list: (kstars-devel AT kde.org). You can also
use the automated bug reporting tool, accessible from the Help menu.
18.1 A Quick Tour of KStars
This chapter presents a guided tour of KStars, introducing many of its important
features.
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