At 08:39 PM 9/23/02 -0500, you wrote:

>Hi folks,

[snipped]

> I obviously misunderstood the intention of the "upper mag limit"
>idea. I should be able to revise the code a bit to accommodate this
>method (which makes much more sense to me; truthfully, the idea
>of omitting bright stars completely seemed very strange to me!)

[snipped]

Bill,

I think I wasn't clear enough, but what I was trying to do with Stargaze
(Yuk!) was to set upper and lower limits to show *only* the layer of stars
in between, i.e. m6.0 to m7.0, and search for wide clusters of stars with
common proper motions. I could set the "thickness" of the magnitude layer
to 0.5, 1.0, 1.5... whatever I wanted, then browsing as far below the naked
eye "surface" as I wanted. When I found what appeared to be a possible
cluster, I would vary the upper and lower magnitude limits slightly.

The method seemed to show some promise, but I gave it up when I discovered
what a rotten program Stargaze was. I always wanted to try again, but I've
never found this feature in another astronomy program.

But I'm no programmer, and this might be more trouble than it's worth.
Would it be useful to others?

Larry

http://www.got.net/~ldart
writing and photography