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P J P starting his talk on iptables Fully packed auditorium for the Python workshop 


Finally I have merged my Google Summer of Code work for KStars and the new feature called “What’s Interesting…” is on master branch. This feature suggests “interesting” sky-objects to users to view. Whether a sky-object is interesting or not depends on the night-sky conditions and the equipment availability. Hopefully this feature would prove useful for beginner astronomers. Although this merge has taken a long time, I never felt like all that work could go waste. Thanks to Akarsh and Rafal for helping me throughout.

While a lot of polishing has been done, I’m sure there is always room for improvement. I’m therefore awaiting feedback from users of KStars regarding any unnoticed bugs or feature requests.





This is really very late. I had been very busy trying to get my visa for Akademy which I ultimately failed in. Anyway, Akademy is over now and things are looking fine with my GSoC endeavour. I am mostly done with beginner-level implementation for the What’s Interesting… feature. My feature now suggests Planets, Bright Stars and Constellations to the user.
 Primary category selection view Planetary Objects – sub-category selection Interesting bright stars Details view for planet Venus

The user can click on a sky-object from the list suggested and the skymap slews to centre the sky-object on the map. The details for the sky-object is shown along with its approximate position in the sky-map. The user can view the next “interesting” object from this details-view as well. Deep-sky objects are available but are unfiltered(all are not interesting to look at).

So I have used a QML interface for this feature. Getting to learn the model-view stuff and actually implementing it was exciting. I miss the thrill now a bit. 😉 Anyway, back to brief technicality, the models for the QML ListViews are defined in C++ classes by using QStringList based models for the category selection views and by sub-classing  QAbstractListModel (class SkyObjListModel ) for the list of interesting sky-objects belonging to a particular category. Sky objects are stored as SkyObjItems. The SkyObjItem class subclasses QObject and its instances are used as items in the SkyObjListModel. I later plan to write another blog on how I used the C++ list model in QML and how the different signals from the QML interface were implemented in C++ slots.

What next? Next I will move on to dark-sky objects. I will implement the light-pollution and equipment parameters and try to get an interesting list. I have designed the wizard that would ask the user for location conditions and equipment parameters. I will be using this formula from this paper by JOSÉ RAMÓN TORRES LAPASIÓ to calculate the limiting magnitude for sky-objects. Here is the useful part: Formula for True Limiting Magnitude

Bortle Dark-Sky Scale will be used to calculate the LM and subsequently the SB_0T. This will be used to calculate the TLM.

Huff..so all this for the next few days. I need to push hard though and make up for time I had to sacrifice during the visa application process. Hopefully I can get the the DSO stuff working in a week. And yeah I’ll buy a pair of astronomical binoculars to actually test my feature. Or maybe a telescope? Will see. Till then, cheers! 🙂

P.S. : Also you can “checkout” my work from my KStars repository branch – gsoc2012-samxan. 🙂




This reaction comes late; due to college examinations( 😐 )… but YIPPIE! 😀 I’m a GSoCer now!

As already stated in my earlier blog post, my work proposal is for KStars, under KDE. It really feels nice having this opportunity to contribute a lot more to KStars again. I will be working alongside Rishab Arora who’ll be working on “Improving Data Storage, Logs and adding DSO catalogs to KStars”. KStars got 2 slots this year and KDE got 60; again awesome! 🙂

By the way, my plan is to “Make KStars more usable to beginner astronomers by adding ‘What’s Interesting…’ feature to KStars and by making ‘Star Hopping’ feature user-configurable”. This idea is something that has interested me for a long time now. Its time to actually code and implement it. Do have a look at my earlier blog post –> Applying for GSoC 2012 and my proposal on KStars for more details.

Also here is my proposal abstract –> http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2012/samxan/16001

Will start work as soon as my exams get over (which will be after the 1st week of May). Nevertheless, I’ll be staying in touch with the community until then. 🙂





“What’s Interesting…”

Visible sky objects are sky objects meeting the following two conditions:




At last there are supernovae on the skymap of KStars! Small orange ‘+’ signs mark the spots of fury. The list of recent supernovae can be created/updated by using the Update Recent Supernovae Data option under Settings—>Updates. Also Supernovae can be found by using the Find Dialog Box by using their serial number. And right clicking on supernovae and getting some detailed information also works. 🙂 Anyway, let me finish this quick.. need to catch a train tomorrow morning and really need to catch up with some sleep.

So what next? Well, checking for new supernovae discoveries at startup and alerting the user of such discoveries needs to be done. Also the user needs to have the freedom of choosing whether to see those orange ‘+’ signs on the skymap. I somehow find them a little irritating. 😛


 samikshan’s tweets



