Re the Charon speed issues: there are a whole slew of parameters that
can cause speed troubles.

First, as Bob mentioned, is the search distance. This should be large
enough to cover the CCD, but not much more than that.

Also, check your scale tolerance. When you're setting up Charon, you
often have only a vague idea as to your true focal length (especially with
an SCT) and will set, say, a 50% scale tolerance. Once you've got things
up and running and Charon has measured your focal length, you can enter that
value and cut the tolerance down to, say, 1% (just enough to allow for the
fact that the focal length does vary a bit over time).

Dropping the magnitude limit can help. It may also help evade the fact
that the fainter stars in most catalogs are also the least precisely measured.

You may also be able to drop your "Number stars used" parameter. When
this is set to, say, 7, it means that Charon will attempt to do its
initial pattern matching using the seven brightest stars found in the image.
If even two of them happen to correspond to actual catalog stars (maybe
one of the remainder is a target asteroid, two are artifacts, and two
are stars inexplicably missing from the star catalog), Charon will still
often be able to figure out the pattern match and will get correct results.
Dropping this parameter _really_ speeds up the program.

Also: if your image is aligned north/south, try setting the "Max tilt
angle". If you expect the image to be offset from north/south by at most,
say, ten degrees, you'd set this parameter to be ten. By doing so, you
confine the orientation to a 20-degree range out of the full 360, and
therefore, Charon can instantly ignore 17 of 18 possible pattern matches.
Again, things speed up.

And if worst come to worst, my standard offer: send me an example image
and the CHARON.DAT file you're using, and I'll see what I can find.

Re "real-time" display: the version currently on the Web site asks you
to set the update frequency for real-time animation. You can set this to
a very long time frame if you wish, because the date/time will still be
updated every time you force a redraw (pan, zoom, go to object, etc.)
In that case, the need Pat Madden cited for lots of computing power goes
away. For more comments, see

http://www.projectpluto.com/update7b.htm#realtime_freq

-- Bill