Alrighty, we've had one for the astrometrics, now one for the photometrics. This is trickier, and possibly best ignored by most people.

Backup the file ecanned.dat from the Guide directory, make a copy. The original will be safe in the last Guide8.zip you updgraded from too, and you can copy that original over to restore if problems arise.

Open ecanned.dat in a text editor, and go two thirds to three quarters of the way down the file until you get to the subsection starting

~hipp

in that subsection press page down about two times, and you'll come to lines like these

~r339 0 M publication of the HIC\n

~r399 9 ^BD^ %s
~r410 9 ^CD^ %s
~r421 9 ^CP^ %s

~r436 12 ^Spectral type^ %s\n

it's the BD , CD etc bit that needs changing

The following is six lines, each line stars with a ~ so word wrap needs fixing accordingly

~r399 9 ^BD^ %s
~r399 9 ^GCPD//xhttp://obswww.unige.ch/gcpd/cgi-bin/genIndex.cgi?ident=DM+%s&button=Query+by+Star+Number^\n
~r410 9 ^CD^ %s
~r410 9 ^GCPD//xhttp://obswww.unige.ch/gcpd/cgi-bin/genIndex.cgi?ident=DM+%s&button=Query+by+Star+Number^\n
~r421 9 ^CP^ %s
~r421 9 ^GCPD//xhttp://obswww.unige.ch/gcpd/cgi-bin/genIndex.cgi?ident=DM+%s&button=Query+by+Star+Number^\n

each line starting like ~r399 9 with nothing after it needs six spaces behind it followed by the complete line starting ^GCPD and ending in ^\n , all on one line, so there are six lines, one each of the original three like

~r399 9 ^BD^ %s

etc is now followed by one line of url

And that's it basically. Save the file.

For every Hipparcos star with built in More Info in Guide when you look at the Hipparcos info you'll scroll down and next to the Durchmusterung cross IDs there will now be a red GCPD link, which when clicked on will goto that star's entry, if there is one, in the online General Catalogue of Photometric Data at Lausanne, via your Browser of choice.

Ideally, I'd rather have this for all stars in Tycho, as many DM stars will have photometry, taking people down to mag 10 or 10.5 or so, but I don't quite remember how to hook that into strings.dat, nor if that will really work.

This uses the generalised Durchmusterung codes invisibly. I've done some checking and the HD stars returned do tally with the HD ID Guide's more info returns for several cases of BD, CD and CPD stars, so hopefully there're no major problems.

There are fainter objects than in DM ones in the GCPD, but they have esoteric codes, or not easily hooked identities. There is a somewhat nonstandard coordinate search, but it also got fussy about things like -09 degrees, which it couldn't see as a number, for instance, whilst -10 upwards it could, so just got messy.

That's about it really. It should work. If every HD star has a photometric entry in the GCPD, and there's a lot of non HD DM stars in there too, that's going on for a third of a million stars. However, this is limited to the 118,000+ (from memory) objects in the Hipparcos catalogue because of the only way I managed to transparently hook it in.

And finally, every time you upgrade, or restore, from a Guide8.zip, this modified ecanned.dat will be replaced by another, and this change lost. For upgrades you often need the new ecanned.dat, so you'll just have to do this again if you like/need it.

Cheers

John