A standard KDE help menu: you can access this document (the KStars Handbook), file a bug report, or view our About Box.
The right-click popup menu is context-sensitive, meaning it is different depending on what kind of object you click on. We list all possible popup menu items here, with the object type [in brackets].
Identification and type: The top three lines are devoted to the name(s) of the object, and its type. For stars, the Spectral Type is also shown here.
Center and Track: Center the display on this location, and engage tracking. Equivalent to double-clicking.
Show 1st/2nd Gen DSS Image: The Digitized Sky Survey is an incredible resource: a photographic atlas of the entire sky. Through the miracle of the internet, you can download a photograph of any patch of sky. KStars provides one-click access to this database. There are two generations of the Survey; the second generation is not yet complete, so you may get an error when requesting a “2nd Gen DSS” image. Note that the image files are large, and may not be very aesthetic. If other images are available for your object, you should try them first.
Show SEDS Information Page: The Students For the Exploration and Development of Space have a wonderful website, which includes very extensive information on the Solar System and on Messier objects. KStars provides links to these pages in the popup menu.
Show SEDS Image: The main image of this Messier object from the SEDS.org information page.
Show HST Image: Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope periodically publish beautiful images from the HST as press releases. Some of these are pretty famous, and have become cultural icons. You can access them all through KStars.
Show KPNO AOP Image: The Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona has a public outreach program called the Advanced Observing Program, which allows anyone to “rent” a 16-inch telescope located on Kitt Peak for a night. This program has been producing some of the finest amateur astronomy images ever taken, and we include over 100 of them in our database of links.
Add Link...: This allows you to add your own custom links to the popup menu of any object. It opens a small window in which you enter the URL of the link, and the text you want to appear in the popup menu. There is also a pair of radio buttons which allow you to specify whether the URL is an image or an HTML document, so KStars knows whether to launch the web browser or the image viewer.