HD install/mags/Tycho-2/Charon, FindOrb

Bill J. Gray May 17, 2001

HARD DRIVE INSTALL ERRORS, FIX:

My thanks to all for the comments on these bugs. It turned out that
they all had to do with mistakes I made in small text files, and
can be fixed by downloading and unZIPping the following file:

http://www.projectpluto.com/install.zip

You will then have to go into "Extras... Install to Hard Drive" and
change something. (If you don't change anything, Guide will assume it
doesn't have to load or unload anything. Just pick an extra language
or something... you can unload it later.)

DEEP-SKY OBJECT MAGNITUDES:

Stuart, about object magnitudes: this is largely an artifact of my
(in hindsight, not especially bright) use of two different datasets to
display different zoom levels in Guide. Look under "more info", and
you'll see that agreement on magnitudes is a rare thing indeed. In
Guide 8, I'll be using data from Wolfgang Steinicke's work on the
NGC-IC Project for all levels. This is quite an improvement over
previous datasets; you can "preview" some of it in Guide 7:

http://www.projectpluto.com/update7.htm#ngc_ic

TYCHO-2 CD-ROM ACCESS:

Roger, as far as I know, nobody has written and released software
to make use of this (free!) CD-ROM. I did get an urgent, gotta-have-
something inquiry that persuaded me to write a little program to access
Tycho-2 data for an individual star:

http://www.projectpluto.com/source.htm#tycho_2

Both source and .exe (for DOS) are provided. Give it a Tycho-2 star
ID and it extracts and lists the position, proper motion, and magnitude
data (Johnson and Tycho) for that star, including sigmas. Not much,
but (as far as I know) it's all there is.

CHARON AND FIND_ORB IN STILL MORE LANGUAGES:

Previously, Charon could run in French and Find_Orb in Italian. But
Jean-Noël Moreau recently sent in the files needed to get Find_Orb in
French, and Giuliano Pinto sent in files needed to get Charon running
in Italian... i.e., both programs now run in both languages. Speakers
of those languages should be able to re-download the program(s) from the
Web site, unZIP them, and have them start up in the correct language.

-- Bill