In a prior task the stars plugin has been extended to support star colors.

This task will make the sky look a bit more "realistic" for bright stars: For all stars brighter than 2 mag the drawEllipse call inside the StarsPlugin should be replaced by a drawPixmap call (mind the center!). According to some mockups and tests I made this will look quite beautiful:

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/starmockup.png

The following star pixmaps are directly related to the colors specified inside http://www.google-melange.com/gci/task/view/google/gci2012/8079206 :

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_0_blue.png

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_0_bluewhite.png

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_0_white.png

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_0_yellow.png

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_0_orange.png

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_0_red.png

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_0_garnetred.png

These pixmaps should be drawn unmodified at the same size for stars of the respective color with a magnitude < -1 mag (e.g. Sirius). Just use "nearest neighbor" approach to identify the right pixmap color. Ideally the mapping is done in the stars.dat file already (to save performance).

For stars with a magnitude < 0 (and >= -1) the pixmaps should be smooth-scaled down to 90% of the original size.

For stars with a magnitude < 1 (and >= 0) the pixmaps should be smooth-scaled down to 80% of the original size.

For stars with a magnitude < 2 (and >= 1) the pixmaps should be smooth-scaled down to 70% of the original size.

For magnitude < 3 (and >=2) there's a separate set of pixmaps:

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_3_blue.png

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_3_bluewhite.png 

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_3_garnetred.png

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_3_orange.png 

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_3_red.png 

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_3_white.png 

http://devel-home.kde.org/~tackat/star_3_yellow.png