KStars is a multiplatform astronomy software that simulates a planetarium. It is part of KDE. Licensed under the terms of the GPL, KStars is free software. Provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from anywhere on Earth, at any date and time.
Includes more than 130.000 stars, 13.000 deep space objects, all 88 constellations, thousands of comets and asteroids, as well as the eight planets of the Solar System, the Sun and the Moon.
On the other hand, it offers multiple information about all stellar objects in the form of hypertext. It also allows you to control telescopes and CCD cameras from the program itself.
For astronomical calculations, Astrocalculator can be used to predict conjunctions, lunar eclipses, and perform many common astronomical calculations.
About KStars
This astronomy software It has several interesting features among which we can highlight:
- Change your geographic location to see how your view of the sky changes with latitude.
- It allows the user to see and understand the difference between sidereal days and solar days by changing the speed of the simulation.
- Explore coordinate systems by switching between equatorial and horizontal coordinates. In addition, coordinate conversions can be performed in the KStars Astrocalculator.
- Connect trails to the planets and set a simulation rate to see their trajectories.
- Possibility of being able to set the time in the far future to see how the constellations change shape due to the movements of the stars.
- Control your observatory using KStars' extensive support for astronomy equipment.
- We will be able to find this software translated into a large number of languages. You just have to look for the one that each one wants within the program settings.
The program will display technical terms that 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 AstroInfo project (part of the KStars Manual accessible through the Help menu).
Ekos is an astrophotography suite, a complete astrophotography solution thatIt 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 resolution, autofocus and auto-guidance capabilities, and single or multiple image capture using the powerful built-in sequence manager.
KStars has been packaged by many Linux / BSD distributions, including Red Hat Linux, OpenSUSE, Mandriva Linux and Debian so its installation in most distributions is from their repositories.
How to install KStars?
For those who are interested in being able to install this application on their Linux distribution, You can do so by following the instructions we share with you below.
If they are users of Ubuntu, Linux Mint or a distribution derived from these, they can add the application repository by opening a terminal and executing the following command in it:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mutlaqja/ppa
Now we are going to update our package list with:
sudo apt-get update
And finally we are going to proceed to install the application on our system with:
sudo apt-get install indi-full kstars-bleeding
For the case of those are users of Debian or any distribution based on this (such as Deppin OS) in a terminal they just have to execute the following command:
sudo apt install kstars
Now for whoever Arch Linux users, Manjaro, Antergos or any other Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. They will be able to install kstars from the Arch Linux repositories.
They only have to open a terminal and on it they will type the following command to perform the installation:
sudo pacman -S kstars
Users of any version of OpenSUSE will be able to install kstars directly from a terminal by executing the following command in it:
sudo zypper in kstars
Finally, for whoever Fedora users or any distro based on it, can install with the following command:
sudo yum install kdeedu-kstars