Silence/GPS scope times/2MASS downloads

Bill J Gray Sep 16, 2003

Hi folks,

Larry, things have just been quiet lately... happens
from time to time. (There's an interesting question here
of the probability distribution of the time between
consecutive posts on a mailing list... it's not a Poisson
distribution, but bears some resemblance to one. It
favors occasional long gaps. But that's a subject for
a different mailing list than this one!)

Guide doesn't do anything "special" for GPS scopes.
That is to say, it doesn't take advantage of the fact
that it could, in theory, grab the lat/lon and time
data from the scope, thereby improving the values for
those quantities in Guide. (I _have_ done a bit of
work recently on having things go the opposite way
for non-GPS scopes: that is, having Guide set the
LX-200 or Autostar's time from the PC clock.)

SebastiĆ , the probable reason for this 2MASS trouble
is that the VizieR server has been going out on us every
now and then, over the past week or so. This means that
2MASS and B1.0 access has been intermittent at best.
You probably got some garbage bytes. Clear off the 2MASS
data (you can do that by clicking on a 2MASS star, then
on "More Info", then on "click here to clear 2MASS stars".)
Then try again.

I have to admit that the access woes have usually resulted
in simply not getting data; I'd not be surprised if it also
caused some garbage data, but can't swear to it that this
would happen. Has anyone else seen this problem?

-- Bill