Re: [guide-user] Asterism display and tdfs

Oliver Kloes Sep 13, 2002

Hi Arild,

about using user-defined parts of the WDS only:

The USNO has a service for personal double star lists from the WDS. I have
written the tdf-file for this last year and it's included at the GUIDE 8.0
discs (At directory TEXT look for DSOL.TDF). Running GUIDE open the menu
"user added datasets" and look for the title "Double Star Observing List".
For more informations and instructions about how to get your personal list
from USNO, open:

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

(Non-Guide 8.0 users: You will find the tdf-file for download there too.)

I hope, this helps.

Clear skies,

Oliver

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: "Arild Moland" <arildmi@...>
An: <guide-user@yahoogroups.com>
Gesendet: Freitag, 13. September 2002 15:34
Betreff: [guide-user] Asterism display and tdfs


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@...







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