Many of the items in the NGC catalog (e.g., NGC 5634) and some Messier items (like M6) have the magnitudes missing in the Details section (right click on object in the sky map, and select Details). These objects do have magnitudes listed in Wiki and in a program like Stellarium. The problem manifests in the Tools -> What's Up Tonight window. One of the selection criteria is Show Object Brighter Than a selectable magnitude. If the magnitude of the object is blank in the database, the object will not be listed as a viewable in the Matching Object column even though the object may indeed be seen with a small telescope. Version was 2.7.2
I logged in as a different user on my Linux platform (a pristine account I use for debugging) and found that all the magnitudes were present when I ran kstars. I must have something amiss in my user configuration which has gone through countless Fedora updates. Please close this bug.
Bug re-opened. The problems seems to be with the optional Steinicke NGC/IC catalog. 1. Create new user and run kstars. 2. Select Pointing -> Find Object and enter M6 3. Click on Details button and note magnitude is 4.2 4. Close Pointing screens. 5. From main menu, select Data -> Download New Data -> and select the Steinicke NG/IC catalog to download 6. Complete download and exit kstars 7. Restart kstars and Select Pointing -> Find Object -> enter M6 8. Click on Details button. Magnitude is now blank. As stated in the original bug report, this missing magnitude affects the "What's Up Tonight" query in that many objects will be omitted. Work around is not to load the Steinicke catalog. The default catalog has 13440 entries; the Steinicke catalog adds 570 entries.
Steinicke is now disabled. We are looking to adopt OpenNGC catalog instead.