Kstars review

If your resolution is to be able to read the night sky, Linux can certainly help you out.

Kstars is a virtual planetarium that gives commercial packages a run for their money.

There's a lot going on in the night sky, and Kstars has a useful object finder that filters its full list of heavenly bodies as you enter a search. This makes life easy if you're looking for a particular comet, planet, star, constellation or even the moon. You can also zoom to a distant object or zoom out to see the full sky. By holding down the mouse button, you can even drag the entire sky around to position your field of view. One slight problem is that there's no way to visualise solid ground, so you always see what's below the horizon. This is a minor irritation, however.

One of the best aspects of Kstars is that it can operate a wide range of amateur telescopes. A wizard helps you set up your particular make and model of telescope, robotic telescope focuser, CCD or even motorised webcam. It also controls other optical devices through the Instrument Neutral Distributed Interface (INDI) and has a scripting language that lets you go beyond simply pointing your eyepiece in the right direction.

Those familiar with the Windows program Starry Night will make the transition to Kstars without any trouble. Kstars has fewer facilities, but those with the cash for a small motorised telescope will be finding, observing and tracking objects across the sky in no time. It can even download images and data about the objects it maps and open links to relevant websites on demand.

If you discover a new heavenly body, find a Near Earth Object or an off-course asteroid menacing us, the powers that be will even name it after you, which is a good reason to keep this particular resolution. Some of the most prolific sky hunters work in their own back gardens.