Steve Coe notes/satellite path

Bill J Gray Aug 29, 2002

A late reply to Bertrand Laville's bug report: he had found that
"more info" for IC 5146 gave you Steve Coe's observations of this object,
but also gave comments from the same source for several additional,
unrelated objects. I've fixed this.

Bertrand also pointed out that Steve Coe's data gives observational
notes for many non-NGC/IC objects, but that Guide doesn't make use of
this. This is true; I've yet to rig up Guide to take advantage of
those notes.

Kevin, about the new satellite path data: You'll have to modify
the "original" sat_path.tdf file (now available at

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

That file has the three lines

RA H 53 10
de d 33 10
text 16 5

specifying that the "RA" (for maps of the earth, longitude) takes
up ten bytes starting in column 53, and so forth. For your file, those
ought to read

RA H 22 9
de d 10 9
text 1 8

You should probably also modify a few of the lower lines that still
point to columns 53 and 33, so that when you click for "more info",
you get the right information.

Of course, the Right Thing for Guide to do would be to allow you
to do something like this: right-click on a satellite and then use the
"Add a Trail" function to create a path showing (in the case you give)
its path across the sky from 6:35 to 6:37 at ten-second intervals. So
far, this is what Guide would let you do anyway. But it would be nice
if you could then say, "Show me the same thing as a ground path".
Guide would switch to geographic mode and show it to you.

-- Bill