Hi folks,
GUIDE BUG IN PLANET FEATURES:
It looks as if I'll have to post a "minor update" shortly. Several
people are having problems getting planet features (lunar craters, etc.)
to show up.
The problem was that, previously, there were far too _many_ lunar
craters. I'd had some requests for a way to filter them out, and had
done some work on this. You can hit Alt-. to get more features, and
Alt-; to get fewer features (the steps are about 50% each time). It
_should_ be that, if you hit Alt-. enough, names will begin to appear.
(I realize that Alt-; and Alt-. are very weird hotkeys. Guide is
running low on hotkeys. I intend to rig up a way to re-assign hotkeys
in Guide... but that's another e-mail!)
But (a) none of this is documented; (b) I didn't get around to adding
a slider bar or some similarly handy way to adjust the level of planet
feature detail; and (c) it looks as if the default level of planetary
detail is really low.
I did the work on this not long after I posted the preceding update...
and somewhere between then and posting the new update, I forgot all
about it. I'll see what I can do to fix it.
FILTERING PHAS:
Alan Cahill asked about filtering PHAs. I don't know of a way to do
that, because I don't know what MPC considers to be a PHA. I'd
assume that the MOID (Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance) has
something to do with it, but the MPC site is not informative about
this subject. (When I posted my list of asteroid groups,
http://www.projectpluto.com/mp_group.htm
I had to "reverse-engineer" most of the definitions; MPC doesn't
provide any.)
The only way I know of to determine what MPC considers to be a PHA
is to download their "current orbital elements for PHAs". In theory,
Guide could 'filter' on the basis of this list... which would open the
door to being able to say, "Here's an arbitrary list of asteroids;
show these and no others."
DOS VERSION OF GUIDE:
Berthold Hamburger asked if the DOS version of Guide is still updated.
It is, "sort of". But I put minimal effort into maintaining it.
Large chunks of the code in DOS Guide and Windows Guide are "combined".
For example, all five of the items added in the last update are part of
the common code base, and work in both flavors. Having these work in DOS
as well as Windows really cost me almost zero added effort.
On the other hand, features such as the change in time zone handling
and the ability to click on events in 'help' to display them are only seen
in the Windows version. Almost all the nifty user interface improvements
have happened in Windows, and can't really be recycled for DOS; I'd have
to start from scratch.
-- Bill