Hi folks,

I've just posted yet another test update for Guide 8 at

http://www.projectpluto.com/new.htm

You may be sensing a pattern here: I've posted several such
test updates, always expecting that they would become "for real,
official" updates shortly thereafter, as soon as any bugs were
found and fixed. As it turned out, I _did_ find and fix a few
bugs each time. I also added some new feature or another that
required further testing. This time, though, I have sworn off
adding new features until the above version has been tested,
debugged as needed, and made "official".

It has a slew of very minor improvements, mostly based on
things suggested on this list (for example, "Quick Info" now
gives the parallactic angle... Marco, I hope that's okay;
getting it into the legend would have been a bit of a pain.)
Lawrence Harris' suggestion that getting MPC comet/asteroid
data be made more straightforward is also now implemented and
ready for testing.

But the larger news is in a bug fix to scope control for
encoder-based systems. Kevin Cooper described some problems
he saw in this area, and found that the lat/lon written to
the alignment data file was in radians instead of degrees.
I think this happened often enough to account for a lot of
strange scope control behavior I've heard of, including the
"reversal" described by Ray Shapp. It was certainly _a_
bug; I think it's likely to be _the_ bug, and now that it's
gone, all should be well.

Anyway, I hope you folks will download the above update,
and let me know should you find bugs. I have some long overdue
updates to post to some other programs, such as Find_Orb,
Charon, MoonView, and Integrat; I expect to focus for a while
on making "already written code" available, and will try to
control my usual tendency to leap into writing still more code.

-- Bill