double stars observers
Bertrand Laville Apr 18, 2003
Hello Bill and All,
I would suggest two different things that should improve Guide for
double stars observers, at least to my mind.
First, I have noticed a strange thing concerning Otto Struve's
catalog.
If you type for example 53 as the number of the Otto Struve's star
you want to point at, Guide points not to STT 53, but STTA 53 which
is a different star. Same thing if you type 66, or 67, 75, 77, 82,
88, etc. For all these stars, Guide goes to STTA of same number.
But, if you choose STT 65, 80, 90, 516, 531, for example, Guide runs
well to the right star.
I must admit that I have not been able to understand the reason why
Guide is sometimes right, and sometimes wrong (but perhaps am I
really wrong ?). Nevertheless, I havn't found any other double star
catalog where such a problem occurs.
The second thing I would suggest concerns the way to choose a given
DS catalog.
Let me tell you what I mean : if you want to go to, say STF 432, you
click on goto double star, and you have to choose among a list of
more than 100 commun names, in alphabetic order.
In this list you will type immediately on Struve, F.G.W, because
quite all DS observers know that STF means Ferdinand Struve.
But if you have to go to Ho 65, which one to choose ? Guide gives you
the choice with Holden ES, Holden F, Holmes E, Hough JW, Howe HA. I'm
not sure everyone knows Hough JW is the right.
Same difficulty happens for several other cases.
The problem is that most of the time, you know the star you want to
go to by its abbreviation, and not by the common name of its Discover.
So, it would seem to me preferable Guide to display the same list,
but in alphabetic order of abbreviations, with the Discover's name
following. For example, we would have:
STF, Stuve, FGW.
STT, Struve, Otto,
etc....
What Bill is thinking of ?
Last thing for Bill : my apologies for my last message. On the
contrary I said, the table of asteroids runs again perfectly in the
quick infos of my Win 98 latop.
And also, many thanks for this 30 march update. Plenty of new and
very interesting features, as in all the the previous ones !
Bertrand