Project Pluto
Project PlutoClick here to search the Project Pluto site
Pagine in italiano su questo sito Web / Pages in Italian on this site
About Project Pluto: Project Pluto supplies astronomical software, both commercial and freeware, to amateur and professional astronomers. The foremost product is the Guide CD-ROM Star Chart, a powerful general-purpose charting/desktop planetarium tool. The main purpose of this program is star chart generation, and it is unsurpassed in this area; but it also provides immense amounts of data on the objects displayed, ephemerides, telescope control, and other useful features.
The Charon astrometry/photometry software is mostly used for CCD astrometry of minor planets and comets. It can automatically match the pattern of stars in an image to stars in astrometric catalogues such as the GSC or A2.0, greatly increasing the speed at which position/magnitude measurement is done.
The Find_Orb orbit determination software can take a set of positional measurements of an asteroid, comet, or natural or artificial satellite, and determine its orbit.
New! Mailing list for Guide users!
Click here for a Japanese version of parts of this site.
Click here for an HTML version of the Guide users manual.
There is a list of particularly interesting events to simulate using Guide.
Some information about software to view Voyager images on the Guide CD has been added to this page.
Some information about the precision of planetary positions and other aspects of Guide is available.
Some people who have seen the current support for the above languages have asked about adding more. Some information on translations has been added to this site.
Some data on custom telescope control (complete with correction for mechanical errors) through Guide is available here.
Guides version 2.0 through 5.0 all contain a little over 30 MBytes of images from the Voyager mission. Guides 6.0 and 7.0 have some of these images as well, though not quite as many. The images can be found in the VOYAGER directory and subdirectories of the CDs. I originally added them thinking that, eventually, I would add software to view them. This was never really a priority (few people seemed interested), and my viewing software did not make much progress.
It is now unnecessary for me to write such a program. You can download PDSWIN20 (a 152KByte .ZIP file) from ftp://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/cdrom/software/dos . It is copyrighted freeware for Windows, and does a really excellent job of displaying and manipulating the images.
The software is also stored in the PDSWIN directory of the Guide CDs. Regrettably, most of the Voyager images had to be removed to make way for new datasets in 6.0, and still more were removed for 7.0. But a few images do remain.
By the way, the images on any Guide CD are a tiny subset of those available from the NSSDC. You can order a set of 12 CDs, "Voyagers to the Outer Planets", containing more images than you will probably ever want. Many are very distant shots (regrettably, the Voyagers were unable to slow down during their encounters); I simply extracted a few of the better images for each target and put them on the CD.
Where Guide users are: (22 Jun 1999) Click here for a world map showing where Guide is used. (There's also a map showing where Guide is used in the United States.)
The background shading shows the path of the August 1999 solar eclipse, since Guide's "geographic display" was really added for only the purpose of showing eclipses and occultations. But the orange symbols give a rough idea as to where Guide users are.
If you're a current Guide user and would like to display this dataset on Guide charts, click here. (Given the file at that link, you will be able to zoom in for greater detail.) The dataset/chart was built out of both pure curiosity and as an example of how "user-added datasets" work on geographical data.
As the above chart shows, there is currently a Guide user at the Davis Station in Antarctica, as well as one at the South Pole research station, so Guide is now used on all continents. About half of Guide users are in the US and Canada, with a lot of users in Western Europe, Australia, and Japan, plus a few scattered throughout the rest of the world (there is one user each in Tahiti, New Guinea, Siberia, Iran, and Pakistan, for example). Oddly enough, while there are a few dozen users in Hong Kong and South Africa, there are none at all (so far) in the rest of Africa or in mainland China.
