Hi Bill,

On 13/09/2010 17:41, Bill J Gray wrote:
>
>
> Hi Patrick,
>
> > Firstly, when I first start Guide, the screen is white...
>
> That sounds as if you've switched to 'chart mode'. If you go into
> Display... Background, you'll see that the first two options are
> "normal colors" (with a black background) and "chart mode" (with a
> white background). Next to each radio button should be a little
> rectangle showing the background color; you can click on those
> rectangles to choose a new background color.

It's not chart mode. The menu bar is visible at the top, but the rest of the screen is completely white. No stars, nothing. I can pull up menus and dialog boxes from the menu, but the background remains completely white. If I press '/' or '*', the screen assumes its normal colour mode, as it does if I click anywhere on the white area.

>
>
>
> > The second puzzle is new to the latest version. In Perseus, a
> > huge circle of stars is visible at all zoom levels. The circle
> > includes alpha and delta Per and is about 6 degrees in diameter.
>
> This one is a bit more of a puzzler. It sounds as if some odd
> dataset has been turned on. I'd recommend that you right-click on
> one of the "problem stars", and then on More Info. It could be
> that this is the result of a download of A2.0 data.
>
> Our friends at VizieR have occasionally altered the formats of
> these downloads. If you grabbed some data a while back, it might
> have appeared Just Fine using the files provided with Guide at the
> time. Then the format changed, and Guide's files describing the
> format changed to match.
>
> Anyway... "More Info" will probably contain a line such as
> "click here to delete downloaded data". Click on that, and the
> problem stars ought to vanish. (You can then download more A2.0
> stars if you wish, and they ought to appear correctly.)

I've never knowingly downloaded any A2.0 data. When I click on 'More Info', it says that the data was downloaded from an ESO sever. Not by me. Clicking the link to delete downloaded data does nothing. Now I have a big chunk of sky crammed with data I don't want.

UPDATE - just got rid of it by clicking 'Clear Ax.0 data' on the Extras menu. I have no idea how that stuff got there, but it only appeared after the latest update. Ah well, problem solved.

Cheers,

Patrick