Hello everyone!

Midterm evaluation has passed and now it’s time for a new blog post! There are a couple of weeks from the last time I’ve talked about my progress with my Google Summer of Code project.

In my last post I presented the alpha version of KStars for Windows that missed some very important functionalities for KStars, such as:

  • FITS Viewer Tool: it is integrated with the INDI framework for seamless display and manipulation of captured FITS images. FITS stands for Flexible Image Transport System and is the standard file format used to store most astronomical data files.
  • INDI and Ekos

In order to have KStars’ FITS Viewer Tool available on Windows, I was needed to build the following two packages:

  • CFITSIO: it is a library of C and Fortran subroutines for reading and writing data files in FITS data format.
  • WCS: the FITS “World Coordinate System” (WCS) standard defines keywords and usage that provide for the description of astronomical coordinate systems in a FITS image header.

Thus, I used my old friend, emerge tool, again: firstly I had to write a CMakeLists.txt for compiling the sources and creating a static library and then I created a tar archive required by emerge tool. For downloading the tar archive I used my personal website as host. (i.e. http://raphaelcojocaru.xyz/wcslib515.tar.bz2)

After I successfully built the sources I ran again ‘emerge –update kstars’ to be sure that KStars found the libraries needed. Actually, I ran it severeal times so my Windows’ version of KStars to be up-to-date with origin master.

Regarding INDI and Ekos, after discussing with my mentor due to difficulty of INDI port, I shifted my focus to QA & Documentation that were not updated for a long time now. Thus, I already created a QA list for current KStars’ version on KDE wiki. I will modify and update it as necessary, removing and adding new tests for KStars tools:

https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Edu/KStars/QA_List_2.6.0

In conclusion, KStars on Windows project is going in the right way and now it’s time to make sure that KStars on Windows meets our users’ expectations. I want to give thanks once more to my mentor, Jasem, who gave valuable help and supported me every time I needed it.

Best regards,
Raphael