news
KDE/Qt: KStars and Photoflare
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GSoC 2026: Teaching Telescopes to Think with AI
I'm very excited to announce that I've been selected for Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code 2026 with KStars to work on the AI-Powered Guiding Assistant for Ekos. Here's what that means and what I'll be building. What is KStars? KStars is a free, open-source desktop planetarium developed by KDE. But it's much more than just a star map. It includes Ekos, a full-featured astrophotography suite that controls telescopes, cameras, filter wheels, and focusers. Astrophotographers around the world use Ekos to automate their imaging sessions, including a critical feature called autoguiding. The Problem: Why Stars Get Streaked When you take a long-exposure photo of the night sky, your telescope mount needs to track the stars precisely.The mount has motors that rotate to compensate for Earth's rotation, but no mount is perfect. Gears have tiny imperfections, wind pushes the telescope tube, and gravity causes flexure as the telescope moves across the sky.
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Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Photoflare Released 1.7.0 with Qt6 Port & GMIC Integration
Photoflare, the free open-source Qt-based image editor, released new major 1.7.0 version few days ago. This is a much bigger release since the last 1.6.0 version that was released more than 6 years ago. New features include Qt6 port, GMIC integration dark mode improvements, and more.