Hi folks,

UPGRADING: Lew, yes, I'm currently shipping copies of Guide with
the "good" CD (no problem with the install to hard drive.)

A2.0 DISPLAY: Dunno what's going on here, even after Denis' post.
Could somebody running into this problem send me their GUIDE.DAT file?
Maybe I'm just not replicating the situation Denis describes as exactly
as I think I am.

SUPERNOVAE: I've just gone into the code and made the "Go To... Star...
Supernova" function case-insensitive, so either "1937C" or "1937c" will
work. That was the easy part.

_Displaying_ those guys will be tougher. The supernova list comes
from the Minor Planet Center (see the info that shows up when you click
for "more info" on a supernova). In that list are two positions per
object. One is given to precision of one arcminute in dec and .1
minute (1.5 arcminutes at the equator) in RA. Not very good, but
it's given for every object. The second position (the one Guide uses)
is precise, but not given for some older objects (mostly ones from
the pre-CCD era, when measuring something to arcsecond precision was
far from easy.)

So if you want to show all supernovae, you have to edit CD_DATA4.TDF
and look for these lines:

file !:\text\supernov.txt
title Atlas of Supernovae
RA H 88 2
RA M 91 2
RA S 94 4
de d 100 3
de m 104 2
de s 107 5

These tell Guide to look for the RA hours, minutes, seconds in certain
columns, and same for the declination data. Delete those six lines and
replace them with these four, pointing at the low-precision data:

RA H 38 2
RA M 41 4
de d 46 3
de m 50 2

In this data, RA seconds and declination arcseconds aren't given.

A truly devoted person could probably get somewhat more accurate
positions for such objects by going through the supernova data and
making use of the "offset" data. For example, in addition to the
low-precision position given for 1937C, we are told that the supernova
was 30" east and 40" north of the parent galaxy, IC 4182. Extract
an exact RA/dec for this galaxy from NGC-IC and shift it by that much,
and you ought to have a very good position (certainly better than a
1.5-arcminute precision one.)

-- Bill