Hi Thomas,

Hmmm... unfortunately, I don't see any straightforward way of
doing this. However, it may not be too difficult for your program
to extract the necessary data from the 'showpick.txt' file, as
follows:

The first two lines of that file always give the RA/dec of
the point on which the user clicked, followed by the RA/dec of
the object on which the user clicked, in J2000 coordinates. (I
added this at the request of a gent with a similar request, except
he just wanted to be able to get coordinates of objects written to
an easily-accessible file. Adding in the coordinates of the point
where the user clicked, plus the rest of the "pick" data, was an
afterthought.)

So you can safely skip over the first four lines of 'showpick.txt'.
The next line almost always begins with 'mag', and can be skipped.
Following this is the object name. For example, I clicked on a
comet and got the following in 'showpick.txt':

03h54m44.205s = 58.684188
+27 42' 18.34" = 27.705095
03h54m30.949s = 58.628956
+27 39' 28.89" = 27.658025
mag 13.2
P/Comas Sola (32P)
alt 71.2 az 146.7
Rise 7 Mar 13:27 UTC
Tran 7 Mar 21:31 UTC
Sets 8 Mar 5:36 UTC

As you can see, if you skip the first four lines, then the 'mag' line,
you have the name of the object.

This _almost always_ works. You would also need to add the following
logic to the program:

Some objects lack a magnitude, or the magnitude data is displayed
elsewhere. If the fifth line isn't 'mag', then it must be the object name.

The magnitude line reads 'mag' when Guide is run in English, 'Mag'
when run in German.

The object name shown is usually the most commonly used one, so a
star might be '26 Peg' or 'Deneb' or 'Tyc2 1234 567' or 'GSC 7654 321'.
DSOs might be given with NGC, or Messier, or a designation from some
other catalog. I could see problems if your program reads 'M 3' from
'showpick.txt', and doesn't realize that this is the same object as
NGC 5272.

Hope this helps.

-- Bill