Hi folks,

I've mostly just mumbled when asked about Guide 9. This is
partly because Guide 9 has been "just around the corner" for a
long time now; I keep running into one reason or another to
delay it. I will continue to mumble about the schedule. It's
been embarrassing to tell people it's due at such-and-such a
time, only to find myself wrong each time.

I can _definitely_ say this, though: people who order
Guide 8 within six months of the release of Guide 9 will get
an automatic free upgrade. (I've done this with each previous
version: order Guide N just before the upgrade, and you get
N+1 free of charge. A lot of people order without knowing an
upgrade is about to be released, and could be justifiably
annoyed if I asked them for another $30 or so just after
shelling out money for the software.)

The software itself will not differ tremendously from that
provided with Guide 8 plus the update on the Web site. The
datasets will be very different: most deep-sky catalogs have
changed quite a bit since Guide 8 was released, and the
asteroid data on the CDs is becoming woefully out of date.
(Though 'mpcorb' provides a way around this.) I may be able to
replace GSC-ACT with the final version of UCAC. If not, I
should be able to replace it with UCAC-2, thereby giving us
excellent star data over most of the sky.

As was mentioned a few weeks back on this list, the
variable star catalogs available now are a lot better than
those from past years. A lot of errors have been cleaned up,
and of course, some new variable stars have been found.

I've been vacillating between offering Guide 9 on two (or
three) CD-ROMs, and offering it on DVD. I'm now pondering
offering it on _both_, though the DVD could obviously have
room to contain some wonders missing from the CD-ROMs.

-- Bill