Is Kstars the best free desktop planetarium?

Kstars is easily installed if your Linux OS is debian based like my Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. Use synaptic package manager or simply issue from the command line sudo apt-get install kstars and Ubuntu will do all the worrying to completely install the package.
It is a KDE package and if you started with GNOME only, the install might take more than an hour just to install the KDE dependencies. It can interface and control telescopes! and knows the longitude and latitude of most places.




Kstars can display more than a 126,000 stars, 13,0000 deep sky objects, the 88 constellations,
all planets,the Sun , the Moon ,thousand of comets and asteroids and the Milky Way.
At version 1.5.4, Kstars have vastly improved and it is so full of features that we have a problem of presenting a short introduction. We'd rather that the reader install Kstars and not rush doing everything. Instead take time to enjoy the accessiblity of a simulated universe under one's fingertips.

Here is a pic from Kstars. We will write additional blogs on Kstart in the future. We wrote this piece to encourage the reader to install the software.




Want to know where the planets are at now? Just enter the name in the Find utility and Kstars will position the displayed celestial map with the object at the center!

Kstars have evolved and may be useful even to serious astronomy amateurs and professionals alike. Nothing give us satisfaction than a free high quality software that is quite so useful in introducing astronomy to Filipino students.


Stay tuned!