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Hi Chris
Stellarium is a hard program to come to grips with at the moment because it is going through some massive changes to make it more suitable for facilities like entry of these extra features to make configuration a lot easier.
At the moment adding comets and changing many of the configuration items can only be done by hand but we are slowly adding entry facilities to the screen menus.
Because Stellarium is real time and updates at a frame rate like TV it is extremely CPU intensive. This makes a lovely display for planetariums but does limit the number of moveable objects like comets that can be accommodated in the main program loop particularly in 3D without greatly slowing down the display.
Quite a few of the extras that are so often asked for will be available in the form of plugins that can be loaded at start up by ticking a box on the menu screen in the next release. Others will be provided when they can be encoded like selection of star databases, integrated sky displays from the DSS and displays of comets that can be added separately with a semi automatic entry of downloadable data in 2 line element form. This is already done in the display of earth satellites(plug in) which automatically updates every 72 hrs if you are connected to the internet and information added to the confi.ini file
The plugin being worked on at the moment is one that allows connecting/disconnecting to a telescope for control. At the moment We only have drivers for Meade protocol and NextStar protocol telescopes but there is a remote telescope control driver now under development for the Paramount. I have been testing the Meade protocol driver and it is easy to set up now from the Telescope Control menu, part of the Telescopecontrol plugin.
Most of the development of Stellarium is done in Linux where Command line operation is the order of the day but it is all done by volunteers who have to earn their living as well and it is supplied under the GPL licence which means it will always be free. This also means that proprietory databases cannot be used so we often need to tediously make our own from data that is available. (like the star data bases).
Barry
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