Hi folks,

I've posted an "in testing" update at

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

Improvements are the fix to getting MPC elements, some new
satellites of other planets, and the ability to limit the number
of asteroids shown. This last is of particular importance. I'm
finding that as we get to about a half million asteroids, the
program can really bog down.

I've also made a possible fix to the Vista/Win7 toolbar issue.

Any reports will be most welcome. This is essentially the software
I expect to release as Guide 9. The difference will be that with the
Guide 9 DVD, I'll be able to provide updated datasets (the ones
on the original disks are getting horrifying out of date in some
cases), and some new ones; in particular, the UCAC-3 catalog.
I was able to compress UCAC-3 considerably, a good thing considering
that the raw catalog consumes eight GBytes.

However, Guide 9 will be on one DVD, not two CDs... there was
just no way to get everything I wanted onto two CDs!

The use of DVD will have a couple of advantages. I think a lot of
people never saw the nifty things on the second Guide disk (things
such as the detailed lunar map and the images of DSOs when one zooms
in). It's not really all that difficult to swap disks and run the
"Install to Hard Drive" process, but it's not something that occurs
to people naturally. My hope is that with Guide 9, more people will
get to see all the good stuff, not just what's on disk 1.

-- Bill