I have built scripts based on the major and minor axis values being the X and Y sizes in arcminutes. I have done a test pull of IC 10 and can confirm that the thumbnail works when copied to the $HOME/.local/share/kstars directory. I am going to go ahead and do the same run to grab and compress all of the PNG files for the IC list. I should be able to complete that tomorrow and upload both the NGC list and the IC list thumbnails to wherever you need me to send them.

This sounds very good. I have been working on improving the "what's interesting" view in kstars and could really use some images for Ngc objects. Larger than 200 and smaller than 1000 pixels per side would be good for that view. Somewhere in the middle (500ish?) would be very good. A download of all would be good but being able to programmatically download them would be good too.

I have the images automatically scalling between 200x200 and 1000x1000 pixels based on the objects overall size. I believe knro is going to incorporate this as a downloadable addon to kstars once I get it to him.

Here's an example of how NGC 2024 looks for me in Kstars now in the observation planner

Ok. Here is what the same object currently looks like in the whats interesting view on my computer now. My thumbnail probably came from google images, I don't remember now. But I am planning to make some improvements in the image downloader as a part of this upgrade. Good sources for images are important. A bulk download might be a good approach but if you have a good method/source for getting images, I could include that for people that want to download one or two but not all.

I can't get the what's interesting feature to work right on my systems. I am not sure what I am doing wrong, but I only see a blank screen on the right side there.

What is your system exactly? OS and Desktop environment? It's QML so it could be be acting funny on some systems.

I have three completely different systems, but they are all running linux mint 18.1 (Sarah). That is most likely the common thread.

Sorry. It's actually Serena, not Sarah. Attached is what I get when I try to run what's interesting. Again, since all three systems are linux mint 18.1, I suspect the issue is somewhere in there. Anything I should check for?

In your data directory you should have a folder called tools, in it should be what's interesting and in that folder should be wiview.qml. Please check that this file is the most recent version. I suspect it might not have been copied properly on your system.

I found the file in /usr/share/kstars/tools/whatsinteresting/qml. I am not sure what version it is, but it has a date stamp of Apr 2, 2017 at 14;57

Yes I think that's the problem then, it changed a couple of times since then. You can try downloading that file and copying and pasting it in there.