[guide-user] Satellites/field of view/PGC

Bill J. Gray Mar 5, 2000

Hi folks,

SATELLITE PASSES IN GERMAN:

There are actually _two_ problems here. Edit the file DEUTSCH.DAT and
look at line 1394, and change


^Erl�uterungen zu den Informationen zu Satelliten^

to read:

^Erl�uterungen zu den Informationen zu Satelliten^\n

This problem was just causing the tables not to line up in columns
correctly. The second problem is on line 1396 of the same file:

Immer im Sonnenlicht

("always in sunlight"). This is two characters too long, so if the
satellite is listed as "always in sunlight" for a given pass, the "ht"
runs over and clobbers the hours part of the setting time.

Ich schriebe auf Deutsch nicht so gern (wie jede Amerikaner, ich
wirklich verstehe nur Englisch), so if one of the German-speaking folks
out there can send me a version of "always in sunlight" that is two
bytes shorter, I'll put it in the next DEUTSCH.DAT I post.

EYEPIECE FEATURE:

I have to admit that requests for this feature run back at _least_ to
Guide 2.0. The idea has evolved a bit over the years; the current thoughts
are summarized at

http://www.projectpluto.com/future.htm#eyepiece

NEW PGC:

As you may know, I'm hoping to get a current version of the Principal
Galaxy Catalogue (PGC) for use in Guide 8.0. The folks behind PGC have
recently provided a way to query data from a database of over a million
galaxies... and perhaps more importantly, it looks to me as if they've
done a great job of cleaning up the all-too-numerous errors that were in
the galaxies already catalogued. Some discussion of this, and a way to
show an example of what PGC looks like now, is at:

http://www.projectpluto.com/guide8.htm#pgc1m

MASTER DARK FRAMES:

Claude Boivin asked if I planned to allow for master dark frames...
at least for now, I hope to avoid that. (In truth, I am only grudgingly
adding darks and flats at all, because from the images I see, there is
clearly a need for this feature.) I have left the way open for this. But
I am not at all eager to do it; it comes too close to "rewriting MaximDL".

-- Bill