Hi folks,

I've just posted an updated 'random.htm' page, to include some further
discussion of how geonames work in Guide and how they can be translated
to other languages.

Also, I got an inquiry yesterday about USNO A2.0 magnitudes, which
caused me to write a lengthy reply about why Ax.0 magnitudes are not
very good, how Guide gets V magnitude data from B and R data, and a
(pretty clumsy) way to improve Ax.0 magnitude accuracy. Some parts of
that "lengthy reply" will probably interest others doing photometry,
so I HTML-ized it and added it to 'random.htm'.

Niels Foldager fixed the city data for Denmark, and there is therefore
a new GEONAMES.ZIP on the site now.

The need for a way to 'filter' cities is becoming obvious, as the folks
using the new Australian dataset are finding out. I should post this
shortly. (I'd have done so already, but there are some user interface
'catches' I hadn't planned on... nothing is ever as easy as I thought it
was going to be!)

Regarding use of languages other than English: the only difficulty I
see is that I suspect we could wind up with enough languages in use to
make the list a true 'list of Babel'. If you look at the posts made so
far, it appears rare for any two Guide users to be from the same country.
(By the way, there is a chart showing the approximate distribution of
Guide users at:

http://www.projectpluto.com/home.htm#guide_use_map

If we start to get posts in French, German, Russian, Japanese,
etc., the confusion level will get quite high. Given that fact, we
might do well to stick to English, and try to keep language discussions
on private e-mail. I say this reluctantly, since my French is pretty
bad and my German and Russian are terrible; I'm essentially in the same
situation as James, where I can read French without much trouble, but
can't write in it very well at all. (The ability to read it is sometimes
helpful; there are some very good French-only Web sites for astronomers,
including some of the text at the Bureau des Longitudes, www.bdl.fr.
But I digress.)

I'll probably be distracted for the next few days on a project to 'fix
up' GSC magnitudes. The idea is to recalibrate them using more recently
gathered photometric data. As you may have noticed, the magnitudes
currently given by the GSC are sometimes _really_ bad... off by as much as
a full magnitude. This is partly because the people who put GSC together
didn't care much about magnitude data, but also in part because they
didn't have much data back then to use to calibrate it.

I dunno if the recalibration will actually work, but if it does, the
GSC magnitudes will suddenly become a lot more useful.

-- Bill