I always have been a huge fan of astronomy, stars, cosmos etc. I must admit that I find it absolutely breathtaking, especially, looking at particular constellations, the way they combine into jewelry shapes that have lots of similarities with known objects. Interesting, somewhere in space there could be a guy like me, looking at sky and finding other objects…

KDE Edu has an outstanding project, called KStars. It provides functionality for observing stars and constellations we have there on sky. First of all, it has a huge impact on educational programs: teachers can use it on astronomy lessons in high school. It does good calculation job and precise enough to be used in scientific researches.

At the moment, KStars has nearly 100 contributors. People has been working on it for a while and you can see a good outcome so far. Still, software can’t be perfect at all and there are always a few features in TODO list. In case if you are interested in contributing to KStars, I have good news for you, there are jobs to do. If you feel yourself rather like a beginner, don’t be afraid, there are some junior jobs as well!

So if you are not a software developer at all, don’t be upset, you always can do some testing/packaging job for different platforms KStars team, they will really appreciate it. By the way, there is a good guide about building KStars from source also, that’s a good point to start with.

Hope you will have fun with KStars!