Hi folks,
First off... Italian users of Guide 8 should take a look at the
following:
http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/imanual.zip
Giuliano Pinto has provided a .PDF manual in Italian for Guide 8,
with instructions for printing it. Quite fancy... we may see a
situation in which Italian users have a better manual than the rest
of us.
About animations: now that you mention it, I think it was Jari's
animations that first got me thinking along these lines. At the time,
I didn't have much of a clue as to how to proceed.
It turns out, though, that I actually can access some "Video for
Windows" functions right from Guide, allowing it to build an .AVI
on-the-fly. I've added a function to Guide that does this; you
click on a menu button to start creating the animation file, and
are asked to specify a file name and video compression method.
Each subsequent screen redraw adds a frame to the video, until
you've got enough frames; then you click the option again, and
the video is written out. _Much_ simpler than previous methods!
I have therefore posted an update at
http://www.projectpluto.com/update8.htm
which also includes assorted other improvements, such as the
galaxy distances/luminosities I mentioned earlier, better control
over isophotes, ability to download DSS-2 instead of/in addition
to "normal" DSS-1, and ability to suppress some spurious stars
from the GSC.
It's been noted that Guide 8 is not exactly heavily advertised
on the Web site. I'm working on that problem, and have revised
the "FAQ for new users" and some associated pages that were horribly
outdated (I found lots of references to Guide _6_). Cleanup is
continuing... I'll get there eventually! In the meantime, you'll
notice that the "history" and the home page are unaltered; I want
to rewrite them quite thoroughly. Expect heavy construction over
the next week or so.
-- Bill