Hi folks,
The 'missing Ceres' problem sounded vaguely familiar; turns out
that Owen Brazell ran into it on 24 August, and I fixed it. It cropped
up because of a change I made to avoid having asteroids appear
twice; this had the unintended side effect of causing Ceres to
not even appear _once_ if there were no asteroids in 'comets.dat'.
Anyway, the current version on the Web site doesn't have this bug.
You _can_ add names so that they'll be recognized by the "Go To...
Common Name" function. Edit the file 'objects.nam' and you'll see
a little cross-reference table Guide uses. So far, it contains three
objects that I knew people would look for via "common name" that
would normally fail: the quasar 3C273, and the SMC and LMC. As
it stands, the file looks like this:
# Comments, beginning with a '#', may be added freely.
3C273 122906.68,+020308.3
SMC NGC 292
smc NGC 292
LMC PGC 17223
lmc PGC 17223
Each line basically means, "if the user enters this, translate it
to mean this." Thus, 3C273 is translated to an RA/dec, the SMC
to its corresponding NGC designation, and the LMC to a PGC
designation. It's case-sensitive, which is why SMC and LMC
have to appear twice.
In some cases, such objects should also appear (or only appear)
in a common-name list box, such as "Go To... Galaxy... Common
Name." This brings up a list from the file 'gal_name.nam'; similar
.nam files exist for the other 'common name' list boxes. As Arild
suggested, a "go to... Asterism" option, bringing up a list of
known asterisms, might be a good idea.
I'd recommend the overlay system for showing asterisms, but
it would really be best to have them treated more in the way
constellation lines are treated, so that you could change the
color/brightness of "asterism lines" readily. (At present, the
color of each line in a user-added overlay is individually adjustable;
you can't change them all at once, the way you can with
constellation lines and borders.)
Quite aside from the aesthetic appeal of these asterisms, I'm
sure I'm not the only person with a collection of "microconstellations"
for starhopping ("to find Chi Cygni, start from Gamma, follow the
integral sign, drop down at the nuclear reactor cooling tower...")
For binary stars: Arild is, of course, right in mentioning that
the WDS is massive overkill. There's no really convenient way
to 'filter' it, either, since the visibility of a binary is such a complex
function of separation and relative magnitude.
However, if you look under "Extras... Toggle User Datasets", you'll
see a "Double Stars: AL 100". This was supplied to me a while back
by Stephen O'Leary. It's described a bit at
http://www.projectpluto.com/extras.htm#al_double
(Note that if you're running Guide 8, you already have the data;
there's no need to download anything from the Web site.)
-- Bill