KStars

KStars is a desktop planetarium program for KDE (a graphical desktop environment for Linux). It provides an accurate plots of the sky from any location on earth several thousand years into the past and future. Of course, you do have to have a computer that runs a version of Linux or Unix to use it.

Kstars was originally written by Jason Harris and is maintained by a team of dedicated individuals who continue to modify and update it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), which strives to make this software and its source code freely open to others as long as they make their modifications free open to others, too.

I worked with the data in Kstars, but have not had time to continue since 2005. The files I created at that time are now likely outdated, but I continue to make them available here in case they are useful. At that time, the file hip001.dat contained basic star data. I created a list of suggested changes and applied them to an updated hip001.dat file that you could download and substitute. Feel free to send me comments.