Kevin, thanks for the pointer on the Canadian names data. I
used this dataset for the "two million place name" dataset on the
second Guide CD, but provided no way to display it (I figured I
could do that part later.)

"Later" has arrived today; you can now show all of those cities
on Guide's eclipse/occultation charts:

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

As you may have noticed, this dataset is _really_ detailed,
giving the name of every small town imaginable... _too_ much
detail for many purposes. A while back, I extracted the data for
Australia and assigned level-of-importance figures for the larger
towns and cities, so that you could filter out the small ones:

http://www.projectpluto.com/random.htm#extend_cities

I did this because Australia wasn't well-represented in Guide's
usual town/city dataset, and I wanted to bring it up to the same
level of detail used in the rest of the world. Canada also
suffered from that problem, and you'll find a similar file for
Canada at the above link, too. It may prove (for Canadians) a
better solution than the full two-million-city one.

"...I can compute the location of where the iss will be seen
going across the centre of the moon's / sun disk..." Aha! I
must confess that I'd forgotten that aspect of it.

"...how can I make it so it looks like, the cities that show up
on the earth map. That's those red dots, with the names in white
beside it." This is defined by the 'type' line. Something such as

type C0000ff;e0,0,10;c15;

would give you a red circle with white text. (Omit the 'c15',
and the text will be the same color as the circle.) All of which
leads nicely to Masaki Kouda's question:

> Could you tell us the format of this line ?

> type sCa27bfb;m-10,0;l10,0;m0,10;l0,-10;

> Is there some difference upper "C" with lower "c" ?
> What kind of color "a27bfb" is ?

The full specification of how symbols are defined is documented at

http://www.projectpluto.com/tdf_info.htm#custom_symbols

The lowercase 'c' followed by a number from 0 to 15 specifies
one of the "old-style" colors (from the days when Guide only knew
about sixteen different colors). It is still supported, for
backward compatibility. When I changed Guide to use full colors,
I added the uppercase 'C' followed by a six-digit (hexadecimal)
color. This is described a little at

http://www.projectpluto.com/tdf_info.htm#rgb_symbols

-- Bill