Hi Tom,

"...Is there a way I can restore the Palomar plates without me
having to do a complete reinstall of G8?"

There are two ways of doing this.

You can put the first Guide CD into your CD-ROM drive, and
look in its 'text' folder for the file 'poss.uov'. Copy this
over to your Guide folder.

Guide will automatically recognize it when you restart the program.

However, I'd recommend that you just fire up Guide, and go to
Extras... Toggle User Datasets. Look for "Palomar Observatory plates".
Double-click on this, and you'll get the standard dialog box for
controlling how a data type is displayed. Turn it on, and click OK,
and you should be in business.

I put that POSS overlay together a long time ago, before the
user-added datasets existed. With the user-added dataset, you can
control the color used for all plates and decide if they're to be
labelled or not. You can right-click on the center of any plate
and get a little bit of info about it (original plate number and
when it was taken and such), then ask for "more info" and find
out further details. The POSS overlay doesn't let you do anything
like that. (Overlays in general still let you do useful things,
such as just add some labels and lines and circles to a chart.)

-- Bill