MetShow seems to do all you need, quite clever really, and reads system date on launch to select showers having date ranges overlapping the current date. Radiant plotted for solar longitude of date, with adjustable date, and mouse and cursor conrols, too (I think Guide would have to have some new coding for directly using, you can't just use tables for radiants with dates because of leap years etc, you've to do solar longitude stuff, and although Guide likely uses Solar Longitude somewhere else, or can likely derive it from celestial mechanics stuff it does for other reasons, it would likely have to have new bits written to use it directly in Quick Info or such for radiant shortlists, because not much but meteor shower studies uses Solar Longitude). That is, the radiant is plotted for date being examined, which latter is easily adjusted in metshow. http://www.imo.net/software

Trouble with making a definite thing like this is that the radiants are mostly determined observationally, like you yourself seem to do with video radiant stuff, so the reference data is perpetually being revised, as IMO says _Working List_ or showers and radiants, so solar longitude and radiant position comboes at any particular time for any shower might be out of date quite soon. Not just as radiants become better known either, but also because the streams' orbits can evolve, and that shifts the times of impingement.

The IMO calendar evidently uses a planetarium program for its charts, and the way the radiant tracks are plotted on these charts shows they are likely generated by the software, not drawn on, as they follow arcs due to the plotting projection at times for stuff nearer the celestial poles.

From the constellation boundary lines on those charts it doesn't look as if it's done using Guide. You'll have to ask Alistair McBeath what he uses, as he might be using one of the freeware planetaria, seeing as he mostly only needs the naked eye stars. http://www.imo.net/calendar/2010 . And of course the full pdf of that linked at bottom is in date order re showers. Unfortunately Table 6 of that is laid out very stylised and is therefore not amenable to TDFing or such without much hand editing, and probably needs a new version every year.

The IMO pretty much has everything needed on its webpages, either home grown or contributed, although admittedly it is somewhat bittily distributed about.

If they don't use it, then I think people probably don't think of using metshow because it's DOS and looks incredibly CGA! If it was converted to a 1024x768 SVGA screen probably more people would use it.

Cheers

John