Hi folks,
Sandy, about the "scope updates": yes, I probably will make
that sort of adjustment at some point. In fact, it already works
that way for Tangent Instrument (NGC-MAX, MG-III, Lumicon, Ouranos,
etc.) devices. For these, Guide shows a red position indicator;
move the scope far enough that the indicator goes off-screen, and
the chart is redrawn.
But at present, it does _not_ work that way for Sky Commander,
LX-200, etc. users. Just something I'll have to puzzle out.
Paul is right; it's actually somewhat common for FILES.HTM to "lag"
by a few days. I've just updated it (and corrected the link to his
site.)
About DSS images: trying to load these into Charon is usually
an exercise in frustration. I think a few people have actually
managed to do it, but the compression artifacts and the fact that
the image is a scanned photograph instead of a CCD image cause the
program some grief. Charon expects to model "stars" as Gaussian
peaks; in DSS images, though, the detector response is non-linear,
and some areas are "flattened" by compression so they all have exactly
the same pixel value.
Therefore, it's generally best to download a FITS image, then
import it into Guide. In that case, the astrometric calibration data
from the FITS header will be used, and Charon is bypassed completely.
Also, I should mention that if you've got your Internet connection
established, you can have Guide grab a DSS image from the STScI
server... you do that as described at
http://www.projectpluto.com/update7c.htm#web_dss
This has the advantage that you can just find an object in Guide and
tell it to download an image of that area; you don't have to fiddle
around with the forms on the DSS sites.
One other issue I failed to mention about GIFs is a legal one. As
I understand it, any code I write that reads or writes GIFs falls under
a patent held by Unisys. Unisys is apparently quite aggressive in
defending that patent, and prices use of the patent high enough that
small developers have essentially zero chance of using GIFs.
-- Bill