Re: [Nova-developer] Nova drawing code

[Jasem M. <jo...@su...>]

Jason Harris wrote:

>Hi Nova devs,
>
>I'm lead developer of KStars, a desktop planetarium program for KDE.  Our 
>projects have slightly different focus (KStars is aimed more at students than 
>at serious amateur astronomers), but I believe they can still benefit from 
>each other.  I noticed you are just starting to develop the sky charting 
>portion of Nova; sky charting is quite mature in KStars, please feel free to 
>use whatever you can from it.  
>
That would be quite useful and should reduce the development time frame 
considerably. I haven't download KStars yet, but the sky charting looks 
very promising.

>
>
>Of course, the GUI stuff will be mostly useless for you, since I'm using Qt, 
>not Gtk, but the projection algorithms (i.e., RA, Dec --> screen x, y) may 
>still be of use, and perhaps the stellar and object databases.  Also, I have 
>code for calculating the lunar coordinates and phase, based on the Meeus 
>book.  It wasn't clear from the API docs whether or not you had that yet.
>
I guess one problem with QT is that it is not suitable for the GPL under 
Win32 enviroment. Trolltech released their Win32 version for 
"non-comercial" use, however, they did not release it under the GPL, and 
thus, we can not use it to develop anything under Win32 license-wise.

>
>I may be interested in using spiderd to add telescope control functionality 
>to KStars someday.  However, I got a "Access Forbidden" error when I tried to 
>browse the spiderd docs...(same error on the libnova docs, but I was able to 
>d/l the docs tarball in this case).
>
>Good luck with Nova!  I'm not a subscriber to the list, so please cc me on 
>any replies.
>
I still get the same error, hopefully it will be corrected soon. Thanks 
for drawing our attention, good luck.

Jasem.