KStars
Desktop Planetarium Source
Description
KStars is freely licensed, open source, cross-platform Astronomy Software by KDE.
It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes up to 100 million stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects,all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets, asteroids, supernovae, and satellites.
For students and teachers, it supports adjustable simulation speeds in order to view phenomena that happen over long timescales, the KStars Astrocalculator to predict conjunctions, and many common astronomical calculations.
For the amateur astronomer, it provides an observation planner, a sky calendar tool, and an FOV editor to calculate field of view of equipment and display them. Find out interesting objects in the "What's up Tonight" tool, plot altitude vs. time graphs for any object, print high-quality sky charts, and gain access to lots of information and resources to help you explore the universe!
Included with KStars is Ekos astrophotography suite, a complete astrophotography solution that can control all INDI devices including numerous telescopes, CCDs, 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.
Astronomical Catalogs:
- Default catalog consisting of stars to magnitude 8
- Extra catalogs consisting of 100 million stars to magnitude 16
- Downloadable catalogs including Messier Images, Abell Planetary Nebulae, Sharpless Catalog, Lynds Dark Nebula Catalog
- Corrections for precession, nutation and atmospheric refraction
- Tools for retrieval of data from online databases
Notice
Originally added as it had a mobile-friendly Kirigami variant at some point.
Rating
Mobile Fit: needs testingThis app has not yet been evaluated - please help!
Project status: released
This project has been developed so far, that its authors felt confident enough to create a release.
The project repository was created on 2020-05-16.
The last known commit happened on 2024-12-30.
Please note: This information is not updated continuously. This particular listing was last updated on 2024-12-30
Packaging
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Install as flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/org.kde.kstars.flatpakref
If you're lucky*, you can install this app by just hitting this button:
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By Category: scientific
By FreeDesktop-(Additional-)Category: Astronomy Education Science
Licensing and technical details
License: GPL-2.0-or-later Metadata: CC0-1.0
Frameworks: QtQuick
AppStream Metadata URL: https://invent.kde.org/education/kstars/-/raw/master/org.kde.kstars.appdata.xml