Bill J Gray advised :-

"If, for example, you don't extract 'ecanned2.dat',
then you won't get the new Hipparcos comments. Doing piecemeal
updates may work, or may fail, and will void your warranty in
most jurisdictions. Caveat user!"

Hi Bill

Well, a bit of a repeat here, but every now and again when I see folk recommend Guide 9 features, the only biggy I can ever think of is the More Info stuff all needs to be in TDFs only somehow, and not in ecanned.dat and stuff like that. I know it's evolved over time to present, and that's why it is at it is, but it'd be nice to get at stuff easier sometimes.

A recent thing I played with was the asteroid MPEC thing. I worked out how to //xhttp an HTTP GET to adsabs to find an asteroid's MPEC entry only, then that could be clicked on to get to the mpec, just from the asteroid designation or name.

Thing was I could only hook it into mpcorb details. The inbuilt and mpec neo download details have another set of data they present, and I couldn't find which file put the asteroid name into the top of the More Info screen, so I couldn't hook an mpec search for everything.

In the end, in that case, it was pointless, very few asteroids seem to have any sort of electronic mpec (well, the e does stand for electronic anyway) discovery thing, a lot seem to be paper ones, not available archived. But for the 2006 QZthingy or whatever it was, it worked fine, from mpcorb tdfness at least.

Stuff like that.

Kind of related are cddata to cddata4 tdfs. All their little tdfs need to be separate. Probably all tdfs in a folder of their own. At present if I adapt a tdf from those I cut and paste it out into a new tdf so any updates replacing those leave the new change untouched (I have the versions in those deactivated). Of course composite tdfs for one dataset, eg ac2000.2, are fine all mixed together, and stuff like that.

It's nearly always outlinking to the increasing number of web archives and services that are the changes. A general simbad and vizier search one, open clusters to WEBDA (mostly, a link out to ic 4665 goes to ngc 4665 though coz of how that works), galaxies to NED (so the leda tdf is pulled out and separate and used for that with a radius search of 1 arcmin), Durchmusterung stars to GCPD, as well as some really obscure ones, like 2mass to 2mass images or glimpse data or such.

Sometimes the place for these has to be ecanned or ecanned2, because there appear to be subset TDFs in there, but only subset, the rest of the info seems to be given somehow else, maybe hardwired into Guide.exe or something, because string searches upon the files in the Guide directory find nothing.

Anyway, that's my Guide 9 wish is that one.

Although I can usually fix them if they get overwritten, by changing the new ones to keep the new features (if I use the backups, if I remember to backup that is, to dig out the urly bits).

It's stuff like this I can't lose, and the toolbar.dat that goes with it, and such, too worrying.

2798 -cI/305/out&-out.all=0 gsc23.dat
2799 -cII/282/sdss6&-out.all=0&mode==1 sdssdr6.dat
2800 -cII/270/catal tcs.dat
2801 -cB/denis/denis denis.dat
2802 -cI/297/out&r=Y yb6.dat
end

as I can't remember how I figured out how to do them in the first place half the time.

I might add PPMX to that for use in the north of 40 degrees' dec, if ucac3 continues to be delayed, when that comes out, maybe, for instance.

Summary : it's the 'net outlinks. Most if not all inbuilt TDF and More Info things in Guide are fine as they, and don't need any work. But there's increasingly the ability to add outlinks for quality 'net resources (even launch aladin and dss images) to these more infos, and they're lost if not careful on upgrades. And they can't all simply be taken up by Guide because different people prefer different 'net resources (some prefer skyview to aladin, for instance), and if they're all included the more info will end up just being one long set of links.

Cheers

John