Hi all,
two parts to this message.
1) Some of you may have read Sue French's Small Scope Sampler coloumn in the
October S&T issue. She mention's a fine asterism named the Toadstool. I've been
writing Sue about my own faviourite asterism, recently named Kemble 2, which may
be found at 18 35 35.0 and +72 23 56 i Draco. Check it out and tell me which
constellation it reminds you of :)
Anyway, Sue mentioned that Kemble 2 was labelled as such in her recent copy of
MegaStar. Now, Guide should really not be any worse off than the mentioned
package, and hence I became aware of something which is indeed lacking in
Guide: data for well-known named asterisms.
Imagine someone wanting to find the Coathanger, Kemble's Cascade or the
Toadstool. Guide doesn't have a separate DSO category for asterisms. I'd very
much like to see one, as well as a fairly comprehensive dataset of named
asterisms. The Coathanger is a border case, since it is actually a cluster, but
it illustrates the broader issue of being able to find any object by way of its
nickname, regardless of object type. Indeed, being able to do a cross-category
search on nicknames is really one thing which would be useful.
2) Trouble with tdf-files. I'm interested in double stars. Guide has got the
Washington Double Star Catalogue as a user dataset (as well as the CCDM), and
that is all well. But, the WDS is a huge database with LOTS of systems. And no
matter how much I'd want to, there's no immediate chance that I will ever be
able to observe mag 18 systems with a separation of .2". Hence I need to filter
the WDS to fit my instruments. I therefore downloaded the WDS and imported it
into a database intending to query this database and export only the systems
matching my specified limits.
I tried this, and added the appropriate file spec in cd_data.tdf in the Guide
directory. However, there's something strange going on. The dataset is labelled
only at specific zoom levels. When I turn my dataset ON, I say that is should be
displayed at 0-180 deg FOV. Well, it doesn't display when I've OK'ed the user
dataset dialogue. Hmmm... I press + to show fainter stuff, and now it happens
that the labels show up, only to disappear after pressing + again a couple of
times. Pressing - to lower detail doesn't always reenable the labels. There's
something very strange there that I'd hope someone knows how to solve.
One other oddity of the user dataset labels, is that a smiley face is inserted
in front of every label at some detail levels, whereas it changes to some other
character when pressing + or -. The chars 5, 8, í have been seen.
These are typical rows in the datafile:
ES 2543 00 00 0 +40 04 4.8 11.0 12.0 And
BU 860 00 00 01.2 +38 51 33 6.8 6.6 11.4 And
This is my file spec.
#Excerpt from WDS 2001
file c:\wds2001\wds_convert.txt
title WDS 2001 excerpt
RA H 9 2
RA M 12 2
RA S 15 4
de d 20 3
de m 24 2
de s 27 2
mag 35 5
text 0 7
epoch 2000
#line size 49
sort 1
#type sc4;e0,0,15;
type 6
label spaces
shown 1
end
Sorry about the long post. If I get this stuff to work, chances are that I may
create an online facility for creating and downloading user defined excerpts
from the WDS to use with Guide. If anyone on the list would find this useful,
please email me. I make no commitments as to when such a service would be
online, but I'm thinking about it.
Best regards,
Arild Moland :)
---------------------------------
http://www.astro.uio.no/~arildmi/Scopes/
http://www.astro.uio.no/nas/
arildmi@...