Hi folks,

First, I should mention that anyone running Guide in Russian,
Japanese, or Italian ought to grab the current "language" files from
the Web site. Alexander Anikeev, Masaki Kouda, and Giuliano Pinto
have all sent me updated files in the last few days. (You need not
download new software to take advantage of these. Just go to the
"updates" page, and download the file for your language.)

Matt Dawson mentioned some problems with entering RA/decs in Guide
and Charon. Guide is somewhat flexible about formats (you can do things
such as use +/- instead of N/S, omit the hms and ' and " marks, and so
forth), but Charon is quite rigid in its format requirements. That's
largely because I expected (in both programs) that people would be able
to add new asteroids using their orbital elements.

That's still the best way to go. Unfortunately, the Minor Planet
Center does not provide orbital elements for objects on the NEOCP (for
those unfamiliar with this: the Near-Earth Object Confirmation Page is
a list MPC provides of newly-found fast-moving objects that they would
like people to observe, confirm, and get astrometry for.) For NEOCP
objects, you can only get an ephemeris.

I see two ways around this oddity. One, MPC could bite the bullet
and provide orbital elements for these objects. I suspect they are
reluctant to do so because the elements will be very imprecise and will
bear no relationship to the final results. Still, we all know the
score here; none of us expect MPC to produce wonderful orbits from
not-so-wonderful, preliminary observations. We just need them to
produce "good enough" orbital elements for finding NEOCP objects. You
might attempt to pester MPC on this subject.

Second, I might attempt to write code that computes positions for
these objects by interpolating the ephemerides. I dislike this idea
(compared to just using elements, it's a horrible kludge), but it may
be the only option.

Richard Mallett mentioned: "...In Tables | Lunar Data, the Colongitude
column is blank." That _was_ true a while back, but it ought to work
now! Perhaps you've not tried it recently? Is anyone else seeing a
blank column here? (Incidentally, the "settable lunar feature colors"
will be in the next update I post.)

Owen asked about the new SAC (Saguaro Astronomical Club) catalog,
version 7.2. I've already modified Guide 8.0 to use this. (I don't think
it will work with Guide 7.0.) It looks to be a substantial improvement
on the SAC 6.0 used in Guide 7. The folks at SAC have made some use of
new data sources, including the NGC-IC Project, to polish up their
database a bit.

Andre, about the COM port timeout duration (for scope control):
take a look in STARTUP.MAR for a line such as this:

49 lx delay 15 100 9600

'15' means "wait up to 15 seconds for a reply from the port to an
LX-200 command". ('100' means 'pause 100 milliseconds after sending a
byte to the scope', and '9600' means 'run at 9600 baud.')

Regarding having Charon be integral to Guide: maybe someday... not
very soon, though! At present, the method of having commands passed
from Guide to Charon works reasonably well.

You also mention "hotkeys to up/down the magnitude limit"... + and -
ought to do this.

"...I have never managed to get the real time animation to refresh
the screen at any other time interval than 1 second, which is
infuriating since I need only see the Horizon motion every minute or
so. Am I missing something?" I'm not sure. You are not alone in reporting
such problems. Others (myself included) haven't run into such trouble
at all.

It _should_ be sufficient to click on the "real time" checkbox. At
that point, you'll be prompted to enter the "Real time update rate
(seconds)" in an edit box. Enter, say, 60, and then start animation.

-- Bill