KStars is a graphical desktop planetarium for KDE. It depicts an
accurate simulation of the night sky, including stars, constellations,
star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, all planets, the Sun, the Moon,
comets and asteroids. You can see the sky as it appears from any
location on Earth, on any date.
The user interface is highly intuitive and flexible. The display can
be panned and zoomed with the mouse, and you can easily identify
objects and track their motion across the sky. KStars includes many
powerful features, yet the interface is clean and simple and fun to use.
Normally KStars launches a full graphical user interface. By passing the
--dump option, you can make KStars dump an image of the sky to
a graphics file and exit immediately without launching a graphical user
interface at all. Several other options are available to control
precisely how this image is dumped.
This application is part of the official KDE edutainment module.
OPTIONS
Below are the kstars-specific options.
For a full summary of options, run kstars --help.
--dump
Dumps the sky image to a graphics file and exits immediately.
Several other options (described below) are available to control
precisely how the image is dumped.
--datedate-to-dump
Specifies the date and time for the sky image to dump (default is current
date and time).
--filenameimage-file
Dumps the sky image to the given file (default is kstars.png).
--heightpixels
Specifies the height of the sky image to dump (default is 480).
--scriptscript-file
Specifies a DCOP script to run before the sky image is dumped.
The script can be used to set where the image is pointing, set the
geographic location, set the time and date, change the zoom level, and
adjust other view options.
KStars includes a script builder (found in the Tools menu) to help
with writing DCOP scripts. The full user documentation (discussed
below) contains a more detailed explanation of how such scripts can
be written and used.
--widthpixels
Specifies the width of the sky image to dump (default is 640).
SEE ALSO
Full user documentation is available through the KDE Help Centre.
You can also enter the URL
help:/kstars/
directly into konqueror or you can run
`khelpcenter help:/kstars/'
from the command-line.
If the KDE Help Centre is not installed then you can install the package
kdeedu-doc-html and read this documentation in HTML format from
/usr/share/doc/kde/HTML/en/kstars/.
AUTHOR
KStars was written by Jason Harris <jharris@30doradus.org>,
Heiko Evermann <heiko@evermann.de>, Thomas Kabelmann <tk78@gmx.de>,
Pablo de Vicente <pvicentea@wanadoo.es>, Jasem Mutlaq <mutlaqja@ikarustech.com>,
Carsten Niehaus <cniehaus@gmx.de>, Mark Hollomon <mhh@mindspring.com>,
Vincent Jagot <vincent.jagot@free.fr> and
Martin Piskernig <martin.piskernig@stuwo.at>.
This manual page was prepared by Ben Burton <bab@debian.org>
for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).
