[guide-user] DSS problems

Bill J. Gray Nov 21, 1999

I read the assorted comments on DSS troubles this morning, and did a
little experimenting. I haven't really made much progress, but thought
a progress report/explanation might be a good idea:

In theory, the 'Get_DSS' program should get a compressed image, with
extension .GZ, from the STScI server. Then it decompresses it to a
file with no extension. It renames it to have a .FIT extension, and
imports it for display in Guide.

The reports on this list indicate that the 'rename to a .FIT extension'
step is falling down. I gave it a try today, and got it to fail _once_.
Before and after that, it worked just fine. I'm still trying to figure
out what was special about that failure, and will post here when I've got
something new. (If anybody else spots a pattern regarding which cases
work and which fail, please let me know!)

Thanks for all the comments on this. And my apologies: I _thought_ I
had tested this code quite well!

Also, Jari mentioned that some sort of progress report would be
immensely helpful. This is certainly true; I'm still puzzling out how to
add that sort of information. (I expect it to be a generally useful thing.
Now that Guide can grab files via the Internet, it may be possible to have
an "update comets/asteroids" button that grabs relevant data from the Minor
Planet Center... or similar buttons to update supernova, artificial
satellite, and other data.)

-- Bill