Hi folks,

Aside from the comments on this group about tooltips and animation,
I got another report that the program was crashing on startup. All three
problems turned out to spring from a single bug. I fixed that, asked
some people to try it out, and sure enough, all is well now.

The bug involved an uninitialized variable, which means it appears
in a semi-random fashion. I got a few "_I'm_ not having any problems"
reports (in fact, I never did see any problems from this bug), but that's
pure chance.

A correction to a previous post I made: to "offset" the PC clock by,
say, -1 hour, add a line such as

TOFFSET=-1

(not, as I posted earlier, TIME_OFFSET).

On another note: yes, variable stars do vanish at fields of view
wider than seven degrees. And this leads to a subject I've been
meaning to bring up...

At smaller fields of view, Guide uses a larger database of variable
stars and DSOs (the file LG_VAR.LMP, for the curious). This contains
_everything_: all variables and suspected variables, the latest PGC
data, etc., etc.

At wider fields of view, Guide switches to a smaller database
(logically enough, named SM_VAR.LMP). This contains NGC and IC objects
and nothing else. The reason is that if Guide digs through the entire
LG_VAR dataset to draw a really wide field of view, it tends to drag
speed down quite a bit.

The only way around this (added an update or two ago) is to edit
STARTUP.MAR and look for line 75:

75 panning 0.500000 7.000000 5

Change that second number to, say, 190, and Guide will use the
larger, more detailed data "lump" file for fields smaller than 190
degrees... in other words, all of them. Drawing at level 1 may be
slow, but if you wanted to (say) display all open clusters, this
would be the only way to do it.

I expect to add control over this parameter from within Guide. Doing
so is not at all difficult (I'd put it in "Data Shown", a logical place
for it). The problem is adding it and describing it such that people
will know what it means and when they ought to use it. I'm open to ideas
in this area.

-- Bill