Hi Paulo, Lawrence,

A few comments here and there... I have been pondering the use of
ASCOM, principally for telescope control:

http://www.projectpluto.com/future.htm#ascom

I would not, incidentally, abandon the current scope control
setup. The user instead could choose to control a scope "directly",
as it is now, or via ASCOM. It's easy enough to provide both choices,
now that I've gone to all the work to support all those scopes. Also,
Guide supports encoder-based systems. ASCOM does not (yet).

"...My point is that Astrometrica is a must and it would be better
(I think ...) to Bill not widen so much the abrangence of Guide. It
seems better to me to integrate with other pieces of sw..."

Charon has been neglected for a couple of years now, and I have to
say that, in some ways, PinPoint and Astrometrica have gone past it.
I am not at all upset about this. On the contrary: Charon's source
code is publicly available, and I know some parts of it have (with
my knowledge and permission) been used in PinPoint. Similarly, if
Herbert Raab looks through Charon and sees pieces he would like to
use in Astrometrica, he is free to do so.

Lawrence, you wrote:

"...I stopped using Guide for telescope control when I found it
clashed with AstroArt that needs the ports for telescope control."

This problem arises when an application requests control of a
serial port and doesn't let it go. Another app may then ask to
use the serial port and be told, "Sorry, somebody else got there
before you."

For this reason, a "polite" program will request the port,
do its business (send a slew command or whatever), then release
the port. Guide does this. AstroArt, presumably, does not (and
I know people have encountered similar problems with some other
software). You might want to contact the author of AstroArt and
suggest a revision to its use of the serial port so that it will
"work well with others".

And now for something that is A Complete Waste Of Time. While
looking for some other information, I came across a wonderful
map of Mars made by Giovanni Schiaparelli, showing all the
"canali", at the bottom of this page (in Italian):

http://www.astrogeo.va.it/astronom/pianeti/marte/schiap.htm

I immediately thought about using it in Guide. After a bit
of effort, I was able to crop and transform it to get a decent
match. To use it, download this file (about 460 KBytes):

http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/schia.zip

and unZIP it in your Guide directory. If you fire up Guide
and zoom in on Mars until it shows a disk, you will (by
default) see the "usual" map, based on ALPO observations. If
you right-click on Mars, then on "Display... Options" and
select "bitmap #2", Guide will switch to the Schiaparelli map.
The map is south up, so I recommend clicking on "Display...
Inversion" and selecting "Chart inverted" to get legible text.

If nothing else, it's a nostalgia trip to 1950's science
fiction, with the straight canals dug by an ancient Martian
civilization to carry water from the polar caps. I'd not
rely on it for observational uses, though.

-- Bill