Hi folks,
A long list of things to reply to here...
SCOPE CONTROL:
Guide's LX-200 control should indeed work with the LX-90 (and
Autostar and other LX-200-compatible scopes). Purists will note that
these are not entirely LX-200 compatible, and they're right. But the
basic commands used by Guide ("slew here" and "where's the scope right
now?") _are_ compatible across all of these scopes.
You may find that some commands won't work. (For example, while
I can slew my Autostar scope with the arrow buttons, the "speed"
controls are not supported.) But the basic "slew scope" and "slew
Guide" commands will definitely work.
MISSING BRIGHT STARS:
I had absolutely no idea on this one, but I think I may have
figured it out, given the detailed report by Werner Hasubick. When
Guide switches to drawing stars with GSC, it first draws bright
stars from Tycho. If you've done an "install to hard drive" and
copied over the GSC, but haven't selected the "Tycho-2 (94 MBytes)"
option, Guide has data to draw the faint stars, but not the
bright ones.
Solution is to put disk #1 in the CD-ROM drive; the bright stars
should suddenly show up. Go into "Extras... Install to Hard Drive"
and copy over the Tycho-2 data, and all should work well.
HORIZON PROBLEMS:
Masaki Kouda mentioned that, with the new version, the horizon
objects (turned on with Display... Background... Horizon Objects) did
not appear, but that they _did_ work in the April version. I've had
no luck whatsoever in duplicating this. Does anyone have comment on
this? Any examples where horizon objects fail in situation A, but
work in situation B?
VARIABLE STAR MAXIMA/MINIMA
I _did_ have a feature in Guide, once upon a time, to compute
the next and previous maxima of a given variable star, using the
data from the General Catalogue of Variable Stars (GCVS). This was
shown in "more info" under "Comments from the GCVS".
I dropped this feature because it was *extremely* inaccurate. The
epoch data in GCVS tends to be 20 years old or older. The predictions
varied from "ballpark" in a few cases to "total garbage" in almost all.
Steve Wolfe is right; the AAVSO predictions are the way to go:
http://www.aavso.org/bulletin/
Some work is under way to improve GCVS, mostly in getting accurate
position data. Maybe somebody will tackle the problem of updating the
epoch data... this would be nice.
If somebody has a good source of variable star epoch data, please
let me know. There's a method available in the 'note' system of Guide
that would allow use of such data, with a bit of work.
MOTION TRAILS FOR ASTEROIDS:
Ben Hudgens mentioned adding asteroid motion trails with a negative
number of days, to project them into the future and to make group
membership a bit more apparent. The function was originally added
for just that purpose. For a while, it looked as if Guide might be
used to create an animation for a public TV show about TNOs, which
caused me to create the following sequence of images in which the
"viewpoint" starts out close to the earth, zooms out slowly below
the ecliptic, then rotates to show the TNOs as a "belt" around the sun:
http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/earth.gif
http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/inner.gif
http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/tnos.gif
http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/tnos2.gif
I had to abandon the TV project due to lack of time. But I did get
two nifty new features out of it: the ability to create an .AVI, and
the "motion trail" feature.
-- Bill