One bug fixed/UCAC display

Bill J. Gray Apr 17, 2000

Hi folks,

I got back today from the Northeast Astronomy Forum (NEAF), and am
mostly catching up on replies to e-mail and figuring out taxes. While
at NEAF, though, I finally ran into the occultation-finding bug
mentioned a few times on this list. There's an old rule about "Bugs
never appear until you're demonstrating software in front of a
customer", and that's what happened here.

A gent visiting my booth mentioned seeing an occultation of a star by
Saturn "a decade or so ago". It so happens that, when testing Guide's
accuracy for the satellites of Saturn, I used some timings made by Paul
Schlyter for the occultation of 28 Sgr by Titan (and Saturn), on 3 July
1989. (Paul's viewpoint in Stockholm must have been near the centerline,
since he also saw a central flash!) I'd used this often enough for the
date to stick in my mind.

So I thought I could easily make a sale by showing off this event.
Naturally, Guide gave a "no occultation found" message, even though
we could see that the disk of Titan was blocking the star.

I took a break from taxes today to find and fix this bug, and if you
visit

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

again, and download the software posted there, occultations will work.
(The problem had to do with some code that does a quick test to make sure
that at least some part of an occultation will be visible from the earth.
In some cases, that code was rejecting events that really _were_ visible.)

Aside from that, one other bug has been reported. Jari Suomela got
crashes when using "Quick Info". I've been unable to reproduce this...
any comments, anyone?

I'll look into the problems with running without a CD. I have some
guesses as to where this bug might be; I've been altering that part of
the code to handle the two-CD case for Guide 8.

Finally: Those interested in displaying UCAC1 in Guide should look here:

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

-- Bill