--- In guide-user@y..., Paul Schlyter <pausch@s...> wrote:

> "Several tens" of floppies wouldn't be enough to store the entire
> GSC, instead hundreds of floppies would be needed! Remember that

the

> GSC contains some 14 million stars, so if data about all these stars
> were stored on, say, 30 floppies, you'd have to squeeze the info
> about each star into a mere 3 bytes !!! That's not much....

Of course that's true, but I seem to recall that Megastar only used
the position and magnitude data of each star and not even at full
precision. I think there were 50 or so floppies - must have been a
chore to install...

Anyway, I'm by no means a Megastar expert as I've never used it
beyond the free trial version but am a Guide user since April 30,
1993.

> Perhaps that's why Bill named the package "Guide" ... because it
> contained the Guide Star Catalog ???

The same logic would also work for Megastar with it's millions of
stars.

> But it took 4 years from Guide 7 to Guide 8.

This is from Guide's Help/About Guide menu

Version 1.0 of GUIDE was released in April 1993;
version 2.0, in July 1993;
version 3.0, May 1994;
version 4.0, July 1995;
version 5.0, August 1996;
version 6.0, September 1997; and
version 7.0, November 1998.

Closer to three years from G7 to G8.

Jari