Hello,

I'm curious to learn if there is any interest in supporting the offline POSSI image data from "RealSky" / Astro. Soc. of the Pacific in KStars. Unfortunately, I believe that sale of this data has been discontinued, so whoever has it has it. I figured out that Patrick Chevalley from SkyChart (a.k.a. Cartes du Ciel) has ported the code to read this data to be cross-platform, and I have been able to get his code successfully compiling on Linux. I am personally very interested in integrating support for this into KStars, and am trying to gauge interest.

The simplest way to implement this without bloating up the KStars binary is to provide a server that one can run locally that can respond to a query in the same format as archive.stsci.edu, and then pointing KStars to query from localhost instead of from archive.stsci.edu.

Regards

Akarsh

PS: Now that I am no longer a student but an employee of the software industry, for statutory reasons, I wish to explicitly clarify that all my involvement in KStars / KDE for the foreseeable future is personal in nature, done in my personal time, using my personal devices and has no connection whatsoever with my employment.