Re: [guide-user] Third number in "P.A. and distance" dialogue box
Bill J Gray Oct 4 11:18 AM
Hi Larry,
_Very_ nice catch! I see how you did it, but I'd defy you
to get it to happen again.
You may have noticed (or maybe not) that when Guide is in its
"normal" star viewing mode, you can zoom in on a planet or natural
satellite, drag a line, and get the distance on the surface of
that planet between those two points. (For example, you could
click on a lunar crater, drag a line to a second lunar crater,
release the mouse button, and find out the distance between those
two craters, in kilometers or miles.)
Turns out this feature isn't shut off while in geographic mode.
So if the two lat/lon values you're measuring between happen to
represent two RA/dec values that fall on the face of a planet (or
the moon or the sun), Guide will give you the corresponding
distance. Obviously, not very useful. I've fixed this.
The reason I defy you to replicate this is that the odds of
it happening are _really_ low. The two points on which you click
would have to line up with the half-degree disk of the sun, or
the half-degree disk of the moon. Together, these cover one
part in about 120,000 of the entire sky. Come to think of it,
this seems so unlikely that I'm wondering if you found some other
bug... but if so, I've no idea what it might be.
Now, regarding inversion hotkeys: best I can offer is this.
Edit the file 'toolbar.dat' and add the following four lines,
perhaps right after the number on the top line:
2147 !01.bmp Uninverted chart
2148 !02.bmp Inverted chart
2149 !03.bmp Chart inverted E/W
2150 !04.bmp Chart inverted N/S
Then add four to the number on the top line, to indicate that
four new buttons have been added to 'toolbar.dat'.
When you next run Guide, you'll see the four new toolbar buttons.
You can then go into Settings... Toolbar, shut off the buttons if
you wish, and perhaps associate hotkeys with them.
Ideally, I suppose, we'd have these three buttons, which
would act as toggles:
2547 !top_bott.bmp Flip chart
2548 !left_rig.bmp Flip chart left/right
2549 !invert.bmp Flip chart top/bottom
...and most people would just use one of these three buttons,
to toggle between a "normal" uninverted view and one matching the
view from their scope. In fact, I've just made this change in
Guide. But with the program as currently posted, you're stuck
with the above four-button (and/or four-hotkey) solution.
-- Bill