To do this launch the FinkCommander app go to the FinkCommander menu and select Preferences. KStars is currently considered experimental on OS X so you have to tell Fink that you are happy to install 'unstable' packages. Installing X11 and XCode is easy, installing Fink is a little more involved but there are excellent instructions on the Fink web page so there's no point in my repeating them here. Bear in mind that KStars is part of the Edutainment package for KDE so you are basically going to be downloading and building the guts of KDE on top of KStars, that's no small task Prerequisites for KStarsīefore installing KStars you will need to install Apple's X11 (on the OS X DVD), Fink (including it's GUI Fink Commander) and Apple's XCode developer tools (because we have to build KStars from source). There is very little you actually have to do but occasionally you'll have to give input.
This is not a procedure to start unless you have an afternoon or an evening to spare to baby-sit the process. This does work on OS X but installing it is not as straightforward as one would hope.Īstronomy, OS X, Mac, KStars WARNING 2.7 did run better than 3.0 but failed to render the actual maps so it was still useless! That leaves us with just KStars. I tried both V2.7 and the version 3.0 beta but, although both installed, neither worked. I had hopped that CrossOver Mac would run Cartes du Ciel but it does not. So, instead I have switched my attention to getting either the Linux option or the Windows option working on the Mac. I have not found a single good free sky mapping program for OS X.
However, if you run Mac OS X things have traditionally not been so good. If you run Linux, the question is equally as trivial, use KStars. If you run Windows the question as to which free sky mapping software to install is trivial, install Cartes du Ciel.