I just looked through the MR, Eric. I must say I am very excited to try mosaics again! Thank you for the work on this.

For reference, the MR lives at invent.kde.org/education/kstars/-/merge_requests/241

Thanks for the kind words. I hope I did not introduce a breaking regression by overlooking a detail. There are three elements in the tool: the sky map, the mosaic and the mosaic tile. I did not separate them as cleanly as I'd have liked.

-Eric

Hi Eric. First, let me just say that the overhaul of the Mosaic tool is fantastic. Great work!
I had a thought though. Now that the tool allows for easier framing by moving the frame around, why limit it to strictly generating multi-panel mosaics? I think it can also be very useful for fine positioning a single panel. But the mosaic planner will not allow for single panel jobs to be created.
With that in mind, I would propose allowing it to create single panel jobs. And also renaming the Mosaic tool to something like "Framing and Mosaics" then giving the feature a more prominent position in the scheduler as one of the key steps.
This way when a target is searched for within the scheduler, we can be sure it is framed well.
Thank you!

That's an interesting point, because I remember checking I could use the tool for that exact purpose, single-pane mosaic. However, at that time, the ability to adjust the position was not implemented, so it's possible I missed that issue. A few things can still be improved.

-Eric

I’d echo this. Not to compare the work ya’ll do, but having a single place to frame even single frame pictures would be really helpful. Jumping between the capture tab in ekos to control the rotator and back to kstars is less than ideal.

I’d love an option to turn on and off HiPS within the tool as well. Pulling a hi-res image just for framing is really nice.

Thanks for adding the ‘moving the box around’. That made it much easier!

Editing mosiac.cpp source code to change the Ok button to enable on line 105, and removing the condition when H and W spinner values are greater than 1 on line 424, allowed me to create a 1 part mosaic job.
105    ui->buttonBox->button(QDialogButtonBox::Ok)->setEnabled(true);
424    ui->buttonBox->button(QDialogButtonBox::Ok)->setEnabled(ui->mosaicWSpin->value() > 1 || ui->mosaicHSpin->value() > 1);

This is harder than I thought it would be to edit... how did you do that? I'm assuming I'll have to compile my own copy.

Yes, you need to compile these changes for yourself.