Star blobs/PA/2000 YE44

Bill J Gray Apr 12, 2002

Hi Stuart, Laurent,

As Laurent suggested, this does sound like a sort of behavior Guide
used to have when started without a CD in the drive, and when nothing
had been installed to the hard drive. I say "used to have", because I
fixed this a while back in Guide 7. You mention use of the current
version, so you shouldn't see this problem; if you run Guide without
the CD and without anything installed to the hard drive, you should get
a "Guide needs the CD" message.

But there is one possible "gotcha" here, something I'd not considered
until both of you mentioned use of Zip drives. Guide starts up and looks
for two files, one from CD 1 and one from CD 2. My guess is that Guide
_is_ finding at least the test file from CD 1, perhaps because it's still
in the Zip drive's cache. (This used to be a real headache with some
CD drives. You could swap CDs, do a "directory" command, and see
files from the previous CD. Only when the cache ran out would the
device be bright enough to reload the file tables.)

Does this sound as if it might cover the misbehavior you're seeing?

Hartwig, you're right about the reversed convention... not really
reversed, since N=0 and E=90 in both situations. I'm mildly
embarrassed, since I used to work for a mapping firm (DeLorme)
and ought to have noticed the bearings were off on terrestrial maps.

Pierre, 2000 YE44 is absolutely, definitely not visible. As I mentioned
a while back, this guy got a bogus absolute magnitude in the ASTORB
dataset. Add about 14.3 mags to get a realistic value (in this case,
going from an easy mag 9.6 to a more... ah... "challenging" 23.9.)

-- Bill

-- Bill