Thanks Ross.

As I said I’ve not tried it yet (been too busy with the BAA/AAVSO Meeting in early July), but I hope to soon and I’ll let you know how I get on.

Cheers,

Roger

Roger, Christoph, and anonymous,

I successfully used the instructions provided in Msg. 11072 to download and display GAIA data. I note a few minor items:

• I used 2803 as the index number for the catalogue and changed the toolbar.dat count.
• I inadvertently left the URL line in the g2.tdf wrapped and it still worked, so that may not be critical.
• I did testing in a few small (Level 12, 4 arcmin height) fields in Cetus and Leo, loading USNO B-1 stars in order to have something to compare against, then loading from GAIA. Many of the stars now displayed two symbols. The g2.dat file was correctly accumulating the data displayed on the screen. I checked this with an editor between clicks on the load GAIA button.
• As a different test, I centered a Level 13, 2 arcmin, field between M 57 and IC 1296, then turned the DSS images on. I clicked the load GAIA data button and the stars were displayed with the DSS images as background. There appears to be a fairly uniform offset of about 1.6 arcsec, about what I think the DSS image FITS header data accuracy is.
• I tried some wider fields in Corvus and Crater, using a magnitude limit of 20. A 15 arcmin field worked fine. A one degree field appended 9999 lines of data into the g2.dat file, but displayed nothing. I'm not sure what to make of that. The TDF has a five degree limit. This was probably stopped at the Vizier end, so perhaps that kind of termination results in no display.
• I don't seem to have individual bit-map files on my system. They are all combined in one bitmaps.lmp file. I simply used the PPMXL button, so I now have two on the toolbar. Someday, I must figure out how to unpack the LMP file.

In case it matters, I'm running the 10 July 2017 version of Guide 9.1 under wine 2.0.3 in the Mageia 6 GNU/Linux distro.

My next step will be to experiment with the TDF as I would like to get the GAIA error data displayed by More Info, but I thought it would be good to report success at this point.

Many thanks,

Ross Shuart