kstars - a desktop planetarium for KDE

kstars [ generic-options ] [ --date date-and-time ] [ --paused ]

kstars --dump [ --filename image-file ] [ --height pixels ] [ --width pixels ] [ --date date-and-time ] [ --script script-file ]

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.

Below are the kstars-specific options. For a full summary of options, run kstars --help.

Options that can be used when starting the full graphical user interface are as follows.

--date date-and-time

Starts with the simulation clock set to the given date and time (default is current date and time).

--paused

Starts with the simulation clock paused.

Options that can be used when dumping an image of the sky are as follows.

--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.

--date date-and-time

Specifies the date and time for the sky image to dump (default is current date and time).

--filename image-file

Dumps the sky image to the given file (default is kstars.png).

--height pixels

Specifies the height of the sky image to dump (default is 480).

--script script-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.

--width pixels

Specifies the width of the sky image to dump (default is 640).

indiserver(1).

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/.

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).