In the next article we are going to take a look at KStars. It's about a software astronomy free, open source and cross-platform. The program will provide users with an accurate graphic simulation of the night sky, from anywhere on Earth, at any date and time. Are included: up to 100 million stars, 13.000 deep sky objects, planets, the Sun, the Moon, thousands of comets, asteroids, supernovae and satellites.
This program is focused on both students and teachers. Supports adjustable simulation speeds to view phenomena that occur on long time scales. Includes the KStars Astrocalculator to predict conjunctions and many other common astronomical calculations.
For the amateur astronomer, the program will provide a observation planner and a tool celestial calendar. It will also allow you to find interesting objects with the tool "What's up tonight”, Plots graphs of altitude vs. time for any object, print high-quality celestial charts and access to a lot of information and resources that will help everyone to explore the universe.
Included with KStars is the Ekos astrophotography suite. This is a complete astrophotography solution that can control all INDI devices including numerous telescopes, CCDs, DSLRs, focusers, filters, and much more. Ekos supports high-precision tracking using online and offline astrometry solver, autofocus and auto-guidance capabilities, and Capture single or multiple images using the powerful built-in sequence manager.
KStars general features
This astronomy software is going to offer a lot of cool things. Some of them are:
- Allows change your geographic location to see how the view of the sky changes with latitude.
- It will allow the user to see and understand the difference between sidereal days and solar days changing the speed of the simulation.
- They will be able connect trails to planets and set a simulation rate to view their trajectories.
- Explore coordinate systems by switching between equatorial and horizontal coordinates. They can also be performed Coordinate conversions in the KStars Astrocalculator.
- The program is going to show technical terms which will be underlined in blue. If they are clicked, we will get an explanation. It will allow users to learn about astronomy and astrophysics through the project AstroInfo (part of the KStars Manual accessible through the Help menu). If you right-click on any object and open the option to Details It will allow us to easily access a large amount of information, Internet resources Images, etc.
- The program will give us the possibility to set the time in the distant future to see how the constellations change shape due to the movements of the stars.
- Control your observatory using the KStars extensive support for astronomy equipment.
- We will be able to find this software translated into many languages. You just have to find the one that each one wants within the program settings.
These are just some of the features of KStars. They can be known more features about this software in the project website.
Downloading and installing KStars on Ubuntu
In order to enjoy this software in our Ubuntu, we are going to have different options. The first and simplest possibility of KStars installation is from the software option.
We will also find available the possibility of install the latest version of KStars using the following PPA. I've only tried it on Ubuntu 18.04. To use it, you will only have to type the following commands in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa
After adding the PPA, you can now install the latest version of KStars typing in the same terminal:
sudo apt-get install indi-full kstars-bleeding
To finish, it only remains to say that KStars is a software that will serve a wide variety of use cases. It's about a wildly feature-rich free astronomy software. Whether you are a student, educator, hobbyist astronomer, or astronomy enthusiast, you will find tools on KStars that may prove very useful to you.