For my inaugural Journal entry, a little shameless self-promotion. I am lead developer for KStars, the KDE desktop planetarium. KStars displays an accurate graphical representation of the night sky, for any time/date, from any location on Earth. The display includes 40,000 stars (to 8th magnitude), 13,000 deep-sky objects, all 8 planets, and the Sun and Moon. It has an intuitive user interface, and provides direct access to online resources like images and informative articles.

It's come a long way in the ~2 years I've been working on it, and I can't thank my co-devs enough (Heiko Evermann, Thomas Kabelmann, Mark Hollomon, Pablo de Vicente, and Carsten Niehaus) for all their hard work.

Anyway, I encourage everyone to check it out, and let me know what you think. All ideas/suggestions welcome, but if it's the ever-popular /. rant about an app that dares start with "K", save it, buck-o. :)

You can get kstars from fine linux distros everywhere, as part of the kdeedu package. Or you can get a tarball from our webpage.