Hi folks,
I just made a few new additions to the Web site, accessible and
documented in more detail, as usual, by going to...
http://www.projectpluto.com
...and clicking on "History". A quick overview:
I've just posted updated Guide software to the Web site. The main
reason for this was the avalanche of bugs uncovered in the 'install
to hard drive' feature; all of them, right up to the recently
reported comet bug, appear to be fixed now. (I was not especially
surprised that such bugs cropped up. It was a major change to
Guide's innards, and when you change lots of code, bugs happen.
I'm sort of hoping to get them all tracked down and fixed, so that
when the two-CD Guide 8 comes out, there are no surprises.)
In addition to this, there are a couple of small improvements
involving display of "notes" data from observations of deep-sky
objects made by Steve Coe, plus a somewhat experimental capability
to set your viewpoint to be from a comet, asteroid, natural or
artificial satellite, or probe such as Pioneer 10.
Also, Jean-Noel Moreau sent documentation in French for the
Find_Orb orbit determination software, plus an update to the text
file allowing that program to run in French.
Also, Giuliano Pinto sent the user-added dataset info needed to
display the "Dunlop 100" catalog of prominent Southern Hemisphere
deep-sky objects (see pp. 112-115 of the June 2001 _Sky & Tel_ for
details on this catalog.)
Owen, re GSC 2.2: this should indeed prove tremendously useful,
someday. I am trying to put blinders on myself to focus on the (really
not very numerous) things to be done to get Guide 8.0 shipping; I
should not have allowed myself to be distracted by the "viewpoints"
function mentioned above. But this does tempt me; the catalog
is accessible via Internet, much as DSS is and as I've long wished
some other catalogs were... I may waste a few hours working on this.
-- Bill