Claes asked: "Is the star SAO 76188 shown in new Tycho2 ?" (Background:
this star in the Pleiades, RA=3h47m42.5s, dec=24 07' 42.5", shows up
only in SAO... not in Tycho-1 or in GSC, and therefore, not in Guide.
It's the brightest star I know of that Guide doesn't show.)

I just checked, and Tycho-2 _does_ repair this error, so Guide 8 _will_
show this star.

Andre asked about scripting. This is an area that I've long thought
might be interesting to try. One stumbling block is controlling the camera.
At present, Guide does _nothing_ involving CCD camera control, and I'd
be stretched pretty thin to provide it.

Instead, ideally, Guide would issue a command that would result in
somebody else's camera-control software taking the image. This might be
done by Guide 'spawning' an instance of that software... say, in imaging
the asteroid 4179 Toutatis,

ccd_prog 4179.fit -e60

(meaning "take a sixty-second exposure and save the result to 4179.fit.")

This is the key, missing piece of the puzzle. Guide is capable of
figuring out where 4179 Toutatis is, and of then pointing an LX-200 or
AltAz (Mel Bartels' system) or Ultima at the corresponding RA/dec. It
might even, if we wanted to get fancy, analyze a short-exposure image
using Charon and then adjust the scope accordingly before taking a 'real'
exposure. However, all of this is pointless if we can't control the camera.

"...I am not certain how many guiders would like such a thing..." I
would guess that there are a fair number of people with go-to scopes
and CCD cameras who would be interested. It would probably get me a few
new sales.

-- Bill