Re: [guide-user] Alt + J functions.

Bill J Gray Apr 26, 2008

Hi Kevin,

No such list of functions at present, no. Almost all of them have
been "test" functions allowing me to probe some reported bit of
misbehavior, or to try out something that might become part of
Guide if I can get it to work.

You're probably asking because of the recently added function to
shut off proper motion, described at

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

That is test flag 11. Others (entered in a similar manner:
hit Alt-J, type in the test flag number, and hit Enter) are:

0: If you click on an asteroid, and ask for 'more info', and the
asteroid is closer than 1 AU, Guide will attempt to report the
time and distance of its closest approach to the earth. There
were some odd things going on here; that's why it never got out
of the "test flag" stage.
3: Some years back, somebody asked about providing some way to have
Guide avoid slewing a telescope into a pier and/or below the user-defined
horizon. The idea was that if the slew in question would cause the
scope to run into the pier, or would result in the scope pointing at
a tree or house or hill or what-have-you, Guide would decline to do
the slew. Test flag 3 let me try out one aspect of this problem:
when set, if the cursor runs over a user-defined horizon object
(the objects that appear when Display... Background... Horizon
Objects is checked), the first letter of the constellation abbreviation
in the legend becomes '*'. That just allowed me to test out Guide's
function that would say, "There's something in the way at thus-and-such
RA/dec; the scope shouldn't slew here."
5: Shut off the GSC (Guide Star Catalog)
6: Shut off stars, images, markings (about 99% of what's usually shown).
Used a while back for debugging a problem Guide had at the time. Not
very useful right now.
8: Switch to use of the Bessell formulae for converting Tycho magnitudes
(VT and BT) to other magnitude systems. Of absolutely no interest to
about 99+% of Guide users. There's plenty of documentation about this,
and how Guide does conversions between photometric bands, at

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

The others are all obsolete now.

-- Bill