R Mon/PostScript/satellite code

Bill J Gray Nov 11, 2002

Mark, a minor addendum to Chris' comments: Bayer, the guy who
assigned Greek-letter designations such as "gamma Virginis" and such,
occasionally got to Omega in a given constellation and still had some
stars left to go. These got lower-case English-alphabet designations
(about the only one you hear about is 'h Per', a 'star' that is a
member of the Double Cluster in Perseus). In at least one case
(Cygnus, I think), even that wasn't enough, and he went on to
upper-case A through Q.

Therefore, when Argelander came along and started assigning
variable star designations, he started with R.

In practice, the A-Q scheme gets so little use that if you see
a lettered star, you can assume it's a variable.

R Mon is missing because it was just a little too faint for
Tycho, and imbedded in enough nebulosity that catalogues based on
scanned survey plates (GSC, A2.0) had little chance of plucking
it out from the saturated background. Sort of similar to the way
a lot of faint companions to double stars are overlooked in the
"usual" catalogues.

Rafael, about PostScript files: I _think_ I've caught up
on reported PostScript errors, including the two you mention.
(There were others involving odd colors in color PS files,
strange alignment of text, side labels being misplaced, and
more.) I'll be posting a bug fix update for all this as soon as
I've got some confidence that it's all doing what it's supposed
to do.

Denis, glad to hear the C/C++ source code for artificial
satellites is getting some good use... if you happen to come up
with a VB.net version posted somewhere, please let me know;
I'd like to add a link. (For those wondering what this is about:

http://www.projectpluto.com/sat_code.htm

Not of much interest unless you're a programmer, but I've
posted much of the source code needed for computing positions for
artificial satellites. Guide isn't an open-source program, but
some large chunks of it are gradually going in that direction.)

I may be posting this code in DLL form, which ought to make
it accessible to non-C programmers (Pascal, Basic, etc.)

-- Bill