Hi folks,

In the past few days, I've posted two new items to the Web
site. One is a list of asteroid occultations for 2003, provided
by Masaki Kouda:

http://www.projectpluto.com/extras.htm#occ2003

The other isn't really of immediate use to Guide users, but...
I posted an update (really, a re-write) to the C/C++ source code
for artificial satellite ephemerides:

http://www.projectpluto.com/source.htm#sat_code

Kevin Fetter mentioned not seeing many Guide users in his area
in Canada. The map is misleading here, because the only place
where positions are at all good is in the United States.

For the US, I was able to read the customer database, look for
five-digit US postal codes, and determine the corresponding lat/lon.
(I then added a small random shift so that users in the same ZIP code
didn't land on top of each other!) But I didn't have any such data
for the rest of the world. So I had the software sum up the number
of users in Canada, then scatter them randomly around the country.
Similarly for every other country where Guide has users.

I adjusted a few cases by hand, to show the southernmost
Guide users (at the South Pole research base and Davis Station),
the northernmost (Cambridge Bay in northern Canada), and a few
in "out-of-the-way" places (Siberia, Pakistan, Iran, New
Caledonia, etc.) Aside from such odd cases, the map shows
"rough distribution of Guide users by country", rather than
"here is where Guide users are."

Pierre Laporte mentioned having the "set TLE filename" and "add
MPC elements" functions crash, and suggested having spaces in the
path might be a problem. I just tried this out, making a directory
with spaces in the path and moving files in it and opening them with
this function, without problems. Has anyone else seen this problem?
(Please mention the OS if you have; Pierre had moved to XP.)

Roger, about "Tables... Create Star List" listing some GSC stars
more than once (up to five times): the problem here is that the GSC
itself often lists stars more than once, because they were imaged
on more than one plate. The plates will usually have slight differences
in the positions, and larger differences in magnitudes. Click for
"more info" on such a GSC star, and you get the data from each plate.

Alan, about having some sort of "horizon" limit for telescope
control: as admittedly happens too frequently in Guide, there is
a way to do this, but it is not at all obvious. You can edit
HORIZON.DAT and add lines resembling the following:

f 18 48 0 0 ; altitude cap
0 67
20 67
40 67
60 67
80 67
100 67
120 67
140 67
160 67
180 67
200 67
220 67
240 67
260 67
280 67
300 67
320 67
340 67

The above would cause Guide to draw an eighteen-point polygon
that loops around the zenith, at altitude 67 degrees (obviously,
this can be readily changed) in a "danger! alert!"-suggestive red.

Not the sort of solution that leaps out at you, I realize!

My next project in Guide is going to be ripping out the current
telescope control system and rewriting it. One idea suggested long
ago was to have Guide warn you if a scope motion would go below the
user-defined horizon. (You can add in mountains and such on the
horizon, without much difficulty; see the end of HORIZON.DAT for
details.) I should be able to at least leave that option open as I
do the rewriting of scope control... if I do this, you would also
get a warning when attempting to slew into the above "cap", or
any piers, etc. added to the "horizon".

-- Bill