Mario Lessard wrote:

"...where did the 'visual limiting magnitude' and 'extinction in
the photometric bands' parameters went ????"

The first should definitely, without question, be in place. It
should be shown if (a) your 'home planet' is the earth (atmospheres of
other planets are not yet modelled <grin>); (b) you've a topocentric
viewpoint (i.e., the "Geocentric" check-box in the Location dialog is
not set); (c) you're centered on a point above the horizon (otherwise,
you're looking at the ground, and the limiting magnitude is -infinity.)

For the second, you must add the line

PHOTOMETRY=Y

to the GUIDE.DAT file. (I originally required this because I assumed
the sky brightness and extinction data would be of interest only to a
very few photometrists. That was probably a bad assumption.)

Roger Pickard wrote:

"...I've just read in the current BAAJ that omicron Puppis should
really be called o (i.e the letter after n). This from a VERY reliable
source (Dr Roger Griffin of Cambridge - UK not USA!)."

Hmmm... that's very interesting indeed! After labelling stars with
Greek letters, Bayer proceeded (in a few cases) to use lower-case Roman
letters, then upper-case A through Q. (This is why variable stars start
with R.) But I have no list of these designations. Does Dr Griffin
provide such a list? I'd very much want to see it.

Jean-Paul Verrot a ecrit / wrote:

"...Effectivement je ne parle ni n'écris en anglais (mais je peux
comprendre après quelques efforts, le sens d'un texte)..."

("...Effectively, I neither speak nor write in English (but I can
understand, after some effort, the sense of a text...")

A problem I share in reverse: I can puzzle out several languages,
sometimes requiring a dictionary to get over the bumps, but can't
say I 'know' them.

Not to beat the subject to death, but... I sent eight packages
(Guide and some GSC-ACT disks) today. Three went inside the US. The
others went to Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Canada, and the UK. I
usually would send more to Asia and Australia/NZ and less to Eastern
Europe, but you get the idea. We're probably lucky not to be getting
posts in Hungarian and Polish; those might be a serious challenge to
our collective language skills!

-- Bill