TYCHO-2 USE:

(Hunt back on e-groups site) Here are two messages on the subject. The
first discusses display of Tycho-2 in Guide 7.0 (one-word summary: no).
The second discusses use of Tycho-2 with Charon (similarly brief: yes).

http://www.egroups.com/group/guide-user/408.html?
http://www.egroups.com/group/guide-user/343.html?

Bernd, thanks for pointing out that I forgot to mention the custom
guiding chip. I'd intended to follow my usual practice, that of
"recycling" an e-mail to provide documentation for a new feature.

FILES ON WEB SITE:

Paul Schlyter suggested a file list in reverse chronological order.
I rigged up a way to get such a list from WSFtp, and wrote code to sort
it and put in links to the files. The result is at

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

FEATURES ON DARK SIDE:

Richard Mallett asked if the current version on the Web site allows the
omission of features on the unilluminated side of planets, the moon, etc.
The answer is yes. Also, the grid lines are faded to a dimmer shade on the
unilluminated part of objects.

INCOMPATIBLE COMMAND SETS:

Ideally, yes... all scopes would take similar commands, with suitable
allowances for the fact that motorized scopes do things encoder-only systems
don't, and that some scopes have built-in chips to (say) store user-supplied
objects, or do satellite computations, and so on.

In practice, the different sets don't really cause all that much trouble.
What causes the real trouble is the fact that it's rare for the protocols to
be documented correctly. Each time a new system comes along, I've sat down
and assumed the data on the spec sheets was correct. And in almost no case
was that assumption correct.

-- Bill