It has been 2 weeks since I have started meddling with the code of KStars. It is a desktop planetarium which gives a graphical view of the sky. My work mainly revolves around making it more useful for the scientifically inclined user.
The first step in this direction would be to fix the AAVSO Light Curve Generator Tool as advised by Akarsh Simha(“kstar”) who by the way is my mentor. Recent reorganisations in http://www.aavso.org website has left everything in a mess with this tool.
The mistakes I have identified are that
1. This url: http://www.aavso.org/observing/aids/valaav.txt which is used to retrieve a fresh list of stars is outdated and does not exist.
2. This url: http://www.aavso.org/cgi-bin/kstar.pl do not exist any longer. This causes an internal server error.
A fresh list of stars is needed. I think http://www.aavso.org/vsx/ is a potential solution. But not sure of it. What I am pretty sure of is that http://www.aavso.org/data/lcg/plot is needed to plot the curve right now. Just adding the required parameters would generate a plot. So all that is needed is a fresh list of stars. I have mailed the website admin for the same. Waiting for his reply.
In the meantime I am moving on to my next targets. And that would be to include Astronomy Updates into KStars. I have come across some websites that might help in this regard. Need to discuss with my mentor over this. And that’ll be after 3rd. Till then I will be waiting for a mail from aavso.org and working on new features.
Cheers 🙂
Samikshan Bairagya 
Yay, it’s very nice to see that somebody is working on scientifical features in kstars. I wish you good luck and I’m eagerly waiting for results of your work.
Keep up the good work 🙂
Thanks for the encouraging words 🙂
Great job Sam