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Chart Mode, set colors to match what you want to see printed, and then do a printout. It would be very clumsy to set up colors if you didn't have a way to turn the screen background to white. It has turned out to have other uses, however, and some people prefer it to "normal" mode. The "Red Mode" option converts everything in the chart, and many controls outside the chart, to shades of red and black. This can be significantly less damaging to dark-adapted vision, and is a common choice among people running Guide in the field. If you run Guide in the field without using this option, your eyes will never fully adapt to darkness, and you won't see as much in the sky as you ought to. By default, "red mode" is indeed red. But you'll see a button provided with that default shade of red, and can click on it to select a brighter or dimmer shade of red. Or you can choose a different color; there is a school of thought that holds that a dim shade of green is really the best color for preserving night vision. In "Flashlight mode", the background is red and markings are black. The result is a bright screen that won't damage night vision. It is sometimes useful in finding dropped eyepieces and such: you can switch to flashlight mode, find the missing object, and switch back to red mode. Of course, most people will use a real flashlight with a red filter for that purpose. "Realistic mode" shows a bright blue sky in the daytime and a dark black background at night. Between sunset and true night (when the sun is more than 18 degrees below the horizon), shades of blue denote the progress of twilight. This gives you some clue to the visibility of an event; if you set Guide to show, for example, a lunar occultation, and the background turns bright blue, you can reasonably expect not to see that event. Finally, there are two check-boxes for "Show Ground" and "Horizon Objects". The first causes the "ground" to be shown in a solid color. Again, this can be useful for determining if an event is visible; if you turn "Show Ground" on, and the event in question is in the "ground" area, you know you won't be able to see it. With "Horizon Objects" turned on, Guide displays a few objects at the horizon such as trees, houses, cars, streetlights, and so forth. This can provide a certain sense of scale. It's also possible to rearrange these objects and add new ones; see the instructions in the files HORIZON.DAT and OBJECTS.DAT for details. Some people have done this in order to get a "horizon" that matches their actual observing site. This helps in planning observations (you can get a better idea when the moon will rise from behind a certain hill) and in orienting yourself properly. (Unfortunately, figuring out the azimuth to the objects in question can be a bit of a challenge. You can use a compass, or you can observe a star pass over an object at a given time, then use Guide to determine the altitude/azimuth of
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