Hi Bernd,

For reasons involving a Really Bad Design Decision, I can't expand
that column. But it occurred to me that I can evade the collision by
showing the speed to .01 precision. At present, "999.99" will fit,
but "1000.00" will not. So I now display that as "1000.0", and
really fast speeds as "10000". Something I really ought to have
done a _long_ time ago...

I first saw the "constant height of sun" idea mentioned in an
article in _Sky & Telescope_, a couple of years ago. It was about
"things astronomy software doesn't currently do, but ought to."
Most of them were, in fact, things Guide _did_ do... but this wasn't
one of them.

At the time, I thought: that's a _great_ idea. It's still on my
list of things to do. It would be useful, not just for comet hunters,
but for the more general "show me what the sky will be like at nautical
or astronomical or civil twilight" sort of questions. You would probably
start by setting Guide to the date/time of one of these twilights, by
using Help... Quick Info, and then typing "twi" to cause the screen
to scroll down to the twilight data. You'd then click on the time of
either morning or evening twilight, depending on which of the six
assorted times (civil, nautical, astronomical, morning or evening)
you wanted to see.

That step wouldn't be essential, but it would usually be a nice,
quick way to get to a desired twilight time.

Then you'd fire up the Animation dialog, and set the step size to
(say) five days, then click on a "sun altitude" radio button. When
you started animating, Guide would go forward or backward five days
at a time, finding the time of day that would keep the sun at the
correct altitude.

-- Bill