Of many, many things

Bill J Gray Apr 18, 2002

Hi folks,

A warning: I've fallen a bit behind on e-mails, and at the same
time, have had a tidal wave of them coming at me. I'll get back to
everybody eventually...

Joe, about SA2.0 on the hard drive: the trick here is to add a
line such as

SA2_PATH=14.3;c:\sa20

to your GUIDE.DAT file. The meaning of this, and what it does for
you, is described at

http://www.projectpluto.com/update7.htm#ax0_direct

In essence, once you do this, SA2.0 stars will pop up in the
background whenever the limiting stellar magnitude goes fainter than
14.3, with no need to "download" or "extract" anything.

Christian, about the ST2000XM camera: a search on Google turned
up nothing about this beast. Could you please e-mail me the
dimensions of this chip (number of pixels high and wide, and the
height and width of the pixels in microns)? Given that, yes, I
can add it to the list almost trivially.

Masaki Kouda asked about translating "addcomet.dat" to Japanese.
I did an odd thing here. The French version is "fddcomet.dat"; the
Italian version is "iddcomet.dat"; and so on. Logically, the
Japanese version ought to be "addcomet.dat", and the English-language
version should be "eddcomet.dat".

But when I first wrote Guide (and had not thought enough about
other languages than English), I made the English version
"addcomet.dat". So the Japanese version is called "eddcomet.dat".

I've swapped the elements in the order you suggest. I can't put
Greek letters into the text, but it's quite possible to add "Omega"
and "omega" to those lines.

Please let me know if you have troubles translating this (or anything
else).

To change the default date of perihelion to 2002: look near the end
of COMETS.DAT, for the "(new comet)" and "(new asteroid)" lines. The
meanings of the columns are given underneath; you can reset the
defaults for any of the elements, including date of perihelion.

About the new Web site mentioned by Sebastien: for most things that
would be posted to a site, the current projectpluto.com site works
quite well. But a non-Yahoo mailing list is appealing. Yahoo does
a decent job of supplying mailing lists, making it easy to access
old posts, etc. But the privacy issue is becoming an obstacle, maybe
one large enough to justify pulling out of Yahoo and going someplace else.

I'm quite open to thoughts on this one, though. Perhaps more
generally: what would people like to see added/improved in the Web
site/user group arena? For the moment, it is perhaps best that I sit
back and listen...

-- Bill