Hi folks,

There's a lot of traffic to catch up with here... I'll start out by
answering some easy ones, then come back for the rest.

Bernd, about the 'missing' BT stars: I tried this, and it looked
as if several bright stars vanished. Then I zoomed in on them and
found that they were still "there", just a lot fainter than they had
been. (The exception was Sirius, which appears to lack BT data.)
Do you have any specific cases where stars vanished in BT, even
after zooming in on them? (There _are_ cases where stars have VT
and no BT, or BT and no VT; this simply means that Tycho detected
them in one band but not the other. But such cases tend to be faint.)

Ton, I think you're asking "do the current CDs include the current
Guide 8 software, including the updates posted on the Web site?"
They don't. I get CDs made in big batches; when I run out and get
a new set made, I incorporate the new software (and usually new
asteroid elements and perhaps a new dataset or two). So the CDs
tend to lag behind the update files a bit.

Arild, about 'blocky' stars: the best way around this is to go
into Star Display and set a 'blurring' of about 1. This just tells
Guide to use an anti-aliasing algorithm to make the stars drop off
a bit more gradually (and to scale more evenly with brightness.)

About getting a transparent vs. opaque horizon: I posted a message
about this quite a while ago:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/guide-user/message/2348

I should probably come up with some more user-friendly, documented
way of getting this to work...

Kevin, I don't have a way to show a _line_ on the chart, but you
_can_ show those individual points on a chart using this .TDF:

http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/sat_path.tdf

Edit the file, and the process ought to be pretty clear. Of course,
to use it, you must first get into the "geographic" mode; the quickest
way to do that is to hit the ':' key (to find the nearest solar eclipse
and display it).

John, about the Starlight camera: if you select the "MX916", you
have a camera with 376x290 pixels. Bin this 2x2, and you have a 188x145
pixel camera, which is what you're seeing now (and what you don't want).

If you instead select "MX916 HiRes", you have a camera with 752x580
pixels. Bin them 2x2, and you get the 376x290 pixels you mention.
(Both cameras cover the same amount of sky; the HiRes has twice as
many pixels in each axis, but half the size.)

-- Bill