Hi folks,

Robert Burns asked about an automated "slew scope", in which Guide
would simply read the Sky Commander's position every few seconds and
update accordingly.

Right now, no, it doesn't do that. Only the Tangent Instrument
boxes are rigged for this (you push the scope around, and a little
indicator follows it on-screen, and the chart recenters after you
push the scope far enough.) One more side benefit I hope to reap
from the rewriting of scope control in Guide... in theory, if system
A supports thus-and-such Guide-related feature, system B will support
it, too. (At present, each system is treated independently. That
led to a maze of redundant code... it's quite ugly!)

Robert also asked about the limiting magnitude shown by Guide,
"out of the box". That would be the same as the limiting magnitude
of the GSC, which varies according to where you are in the sky.
In sparse areas, it goes as low as mag 15 or so. In dense areas,
you're lucky to get much past 13.5. (The folks who put GSC together
went for a certain number of stars per square degree, _not_ for
a fixed limiting magnitude.)

For a given area, you can click on some of the fainter stars
shown and read their magnitudes... keeping in mind that GSC magnitudes
are notoriously unreliable. (Brian Skiff once made a remark along
the lines of "don't trust GSC magnitudes for anything. No, not
anything.")

Alan Cahill asked about use of RealSky from the hard drive. Only
way to do this is to make a subdirectory, say, c:\realsky, and
copy the RealSky CD(s) into it, maintaining the subdirectory structure.
Then you need to create a drive letter pointing to that directory.
In DOS, the SUBST command can do this, for example:

subst h: c:\realsky

You can then use the "Extras... DSS/RealSky... RealSky/DSS from CD"
option, and change the drive letter given in that dialog box to
that of the newly-created "drive", and extract the image just as
if it came from a CD-ROM.

-- Bill