Hi Pete,

Looks as if Arild and Bernd have pretty thoroughly answered most
of what you asked about... I'll just add a comment or two.

By default, Guide only puts a few megabytes onto the hard drive
and assumes you'll have the first Guide CD in the CD drive. If you
go to Extras... Install to Hard Drive, and ask for a "minimum
installation" to the hard drive, it'll add on just enough to let
the program run without the CD. But a lot of stuff will be missing:
asteroids, stars fainter than mag 8, etc.

To evade this, either leave the CD in the drive, _or_ click on
items other than just "minimum installation". Click on everything,
and Guide will install the full CD (about 680 MBytes). You can then
also make use of the second CD, which has some useful items such as
extended range of asteroid elements and deep-sky images which pop
up when you zoom in.

There's also some discussion of this in chapter 17c of the user
manual.

Bernd mentioned using the "caption" item in the Legend dialog;
you should also check out some of the other items mentioned in the
same dialog for giving data such as RA/dec, alt/az, etc. of the
currently centered point.

I suspect what you're seeing with the More Info "information
[seeming] to roll over and repeat" has to do with Guide providing
data from assorted catalogs. For example, click on a galaxy, and
you'll get the data from the NGC-IC Project, PGC, etc. Each usually
has its own tidbit of data to add to the overall picture, and their
agreement with one another is notoriously poor (getting better,
though). I realize some astronomy software authors prefer the
"digest all the data" approach; I've gone with the "tell the user
everything" approach.

The printing _is_ a known problem. Current workaround (actually,
it's been a workaround for a depressingly long time) is to use the
Edit option on the More Info menu bar. That brings the More Info
text up in a text editor such as Notepad. From there, you can edit
it (perhaps lop off all the stuff in which you're not interested?),
then print it.

With the brighter asteroids, Guide should indeed be accurate to
about an arcsecond, even without use of MPCORB. The usual causes of
trouble are time settings (especially time zone) and location errors
(including setting your "home planet" to be something like the moon!)
If neither of these seems to match what you're seeing, please e-mail
me the file 'startup.mar' from your Guide folder; this contains most
of your settings, and I can then duplicate what you've got and (usually)
duplicate and diagnose the problem.

-- Bill