Tuesday, July 05, 2022

easy to remove

I dunno. Must have got my wires crossed somewhere. Or oldmanitis...

During the Stellarium level 2 teach Monday night, it came up —again—the question of "how do I remove a star catalogue?"

One of the participants had gone bonkers, click-happy, gung-ho, and loaded all the stellar catalogues in the software, and then found Stellarium too slow and sluggish.

In the session, I made my usual refrain: it ain't easy removing. I said, at the time, it required removing the catalogue files proper but also an edit of an INI or config file. I promised to provide more details after the class.

Today, I followed a hunch.

Previously, I loaded catalogue 5 of 9, to take me from mag 10.5 to mag 12.

I simply removed an extra star catalogue file from my "user area" in Windows:

c:\ users \bnanc \AppData \Roaming \Stellarium \stars \default

[ed: Path will vary according to your user profile. The "bnanc" is my username. YMMV. See other notes below...]

I noted catalogue number 4 (i.e. 4 plus 1 for the 5th of 9 catalogues) plus a JSON file.

I deleted the stars #4 file; I ignored the JSON.

Launched Stellarium... 

It worked!

I thought we also had to edit INI or config files but that does NOT appear to be the case.

This was fulfilling in the sense that this follows the process over on the Mac side. Ian B had recently run through the process for some Apple users and found it "easy" to do—just delete the unwanted catalogue files.

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A heads-up for Windows users poking around in their boot hard disk or solid state drive. Some files and folders may be hidden, by default, preventing one for immediately accessing the path noted above. You may need to first configure your Windows Explorer, on the View tab, in the Show/hide group, to show Hidden items.

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A heads-up for the non-programmers in the crowd.

The catalogue files are numbered per a common computer developer practice or convention where the first file is zero, the second file is one, the third file is two, etc.

So you'll need to do some mental gymnastics.

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Shared with all class participants.

Shared with the Stellarium instructors.

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