Hi Bill,

Getting a glance (I'm not sure this is good english...) at old updates of Guide 8, I came across this one:

26 Feb 2002) Suppression of spurious GSC stars: You've probably noticed that the GSC database used by Guide (and most astronomy software) is riddled with errors: some stars that really ought to appear do not, and there are plenty of "stars" that would be better omitted. The current version does something about the latter problem.
I wrote a little piece of code to automatically pattern match the Principal Galaxy Catalogue (PGC) to the GSC. This turned up about 80,000 galaxies that GSC falsely catalogued as stars. If you download this file to your Guide directory (about 126 KBytes) and unZIP it, Guide will use the data to suppress those spurious "stars". This takes care of most, though admittedly not all, of the more annoying false stars: those placed at the center of deep-sky objects.

This is one of the great points of Guide in comparison with most other astronomy software.

My question is simple to write, but perhaps not to do: can you do the same for UCAC2, and USNO A2.0, for which that problem is still more annoying ?

Of course, it's only a question. I should well understand that is not to be so easy...

Thanks

Bertrand


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]