Hi Larry,

%(@$!* it, I meant to reply to that when you mentioned it,
in passing, in an earlier post. As it happens, I got an inquiry
about it recently from a gent doing occultation work. He basically
needed a transparent moon, so I had an answer all ready to
recycle. Anyway, here's my recycled reply.

-- Bill

--------- Start of recycled e-mail ----------

About the transparent moon: I slapped my forehead on this one,
because Guide did exactly that for many years. There was an "outlined
planet" option that just drew a circle, instead of stretching a map
over the object in question. This was mostly used in the early 90s,
when plenty of us didn't have machines capable of rendering the
sort of graphics one often does now.

I dug around a bit, though, and found out that the code to
draw outlined planets is indeed still there. But there's no way
to get at it readily in the user interface. I will fix this, but
can offer a short-term solution until then.

To get at it, you'll need to edit 'startup.mar' with a text
editor. Look for a line like this:

76 pl maps 0 12 30 10 32 3 0 0 0 41 42 0 0 0 0 7e 70 7e 70 70

...and so on. Find the eleventh number after 'pl_maps' (in the
above case, 42). Change the last digit to 'f' (in the above case,
4f). Save the file.

The moon will now be shown in outlined form. (The "planet maps"
are for sun=0, Mercury=1, ... Pluto=9, Moon=10, other planetary
satellites following. Since this is zero-based numbering, that
means the eleventh number in the above list is for the moon. If
you wanted, for example, Jupiter to be drawn as an outlined object,
you'd change the last digit in the sixth number above to an f.)