Another very long e-mail:
NEW GUIDE POSTED:
The consensus was that the 'new' Guide posted at NEW.HTM is okay,
so I've posted it as a "for-real" update. I wanted to do this before
adding any new (and possibly broken) code, such as scope-tracking rate
commands.
If you've downloaded the version that was at NEW.HTM, you won't see
much change in the version just posted. (I made a fix to the way stars
are colored, so that if they have spectral class data, they are colored
on that basis rather than their B-V data. People were wondering why
type G0 stars were showing up as blue rather than yellow.)
By the way, regarding the index marks on eclipses: you do have to
set both the 5-minute interval _and_ the 'i6' to tell Guide that every
sixth marking is an index mark.
TABLES OF FILTERED ASTEROIDS:
Andrea Pelloni asked about getting 'filtered' lists of asteroids, using
the new ASTFILTER parameter. It ought to work in that manner now... if
you tell Guide to display only certain sorts of asteroids, that same
filtering should be done on tables created using "Tables... Current
Asteroids." Are you not seeing this?
Andrea also wrote: "...for photometry observations programming we are
very interested to have something else: the possibility to request for a
certain length of time (e.g. for all September 2000) the ephemerides
(mainly the phase angle) of a single object (comet or asteroid)."
Hmmmm... If I am understanding you correctly, you can do this by
setting the date and time to that of the start of the ephemeris, and
right-clicking on the asteroid or comet. Then click on "Animation...
Make Ephemeris." You may have to select the "Ephemeris Items" button,
to tell Guide that you want the phase angle listed.
FLAMSTEED STARS:
The list of Flamsteed stars used by Guide has cross-indices to the
Yale (Bright Star) catalogue, and nothing else. The result is that
stars such as 11 Leo couldn't be cross-indexed to anything, and therefore
weren't shown.
You _can_ use 'go to... star... Bayer/Flamsteed' to locate them, because
the dataset _did_ contain RA/dec data.
In quite a few cases, though, you'll still find gaps in the numbering
scheme. I believe this happened for a variety of reasons: the "star" in
question turned out to be nonexistent, or got a duplicate number from
another constellation, or is lost to history.
OFF-POLAR ALIGNMENT FOR SCOPE TRACKING:
Yes, people could indeed point their polar axis somewhere far from
the expected path of the satellite... I don't know how common that
would be, though!
Another solution is used by some of the US Government satellite
trackers: an equatorial scope is mounted on a turntable, so that it
can function as either an equatorial or an alt/az, as needed. I don't
really think this idea will catch on with astronomers, though.
AUDINE CCD:
I first learned about the AUDINE camera about two years ago, I think.
It looked like a good idea back then, and recent price drops in Kodak
chips have only made it look better. It hasn't caught on much outside
of French-speaking areas. Maybe now that the Web site has an English
version, this will change.
HTML-IZED GUIDE USER MANUAL:
Andrew Maclean kindly produced an HTML-ized version of the user
manual for Guide. This has been posted on the site for a while now;
it's discussed (and available) at
http://www.projectpluto.com/hist_idx.htm#html_man
The printed manual has been updated a bit since then, though. In
early November, I ran out of Guide disks and got a new batch pressed
using the then-current software, so I revised the printed manual to
include all the various wonders I'd added since 7.0 first came out a
year earlier.
It occurred to me that I might be able to automatically generate an
HTML-ized manual this time. The text for the printed manual is in my
own private format; I had to do some odd things to support automatic
indexing and printing a "digest"-format booklet. Today, I finally got
around to writing a bit of code to generate the HTML-ized manual. You
can browse it at
http://www.projectpluto.com/manual/page01.htm
It's stored as 83 files, from 'page01.htm' to 'page83.htm'. If you
prefer, you can download the whole thing (about 120 KBytes) at
http://www.projectpluto.com/manual2.zip
There are a few things I'd like to add, such as links to the table
of contents and index at the end of each page. But considering that I
was able to automatically turn the 'print' version into a 'Web' version,
I'm pretty happy with it.
-- Bill