Hi Oliver,

Guide 9 will be distributed on a new DVD. This is necessary
mostly because I wanted to include UCAC-3 as the basic star
catalog for the new version. Even with some very good compression,
the whole thing comes to about 2.5 GBytes.

So yes, you'll need to buy a new disk. I'll be posting details
on this on the Web site, once I get a little closer to actually
being able to specify a release date. I also want to do a few
things such as set up a secure on-line ordering system... thus far,
I've been sufficiently busy just trying to get the software (and
help system and manual and such) done, that I've not done much
to bring the Web site up to date.

Incidentally, some people have mentioned that the use of a
DVD could be a problem, because they've got an older system
that is CD-only. (Especially common because people sometimes
like to take an elderly laptop and use it in the field; that
way, if something bad happens to it, it's not much of a tragedy.)
The only workaround I see at present for this is to copy the DVD
to a memory stick, and run it from that. You can then install
to your hard disk and delete everything from the memory stick.
4 GByte memory sticks are getting to be quite cheap, and I doubt
many people are running systems that don't support them.

-- Bill