Hi Hartwig,

> A feature for meteor work: How about to be able to set the time in terms
> of year and solar longitude? As meteor maxima are often given this way,
> it would be nice to be able to enter this value that way.

Are you thinking along the lines of: enter the time as, say,
"SL 230.5", and Guide figures out when the sun will be at that ecliptic
longitude and resets the time to that? Truthfully, I doubt it would
get a lot of use... but it also would be quite easy to do and wouldn't
confuse people who didn't know about it, so I'd be willing to add it
anyway.

It _does_ also make me think, though, that even more useful to some
people would be "M 23.5", to set Guide to the point when the moon is
23.5 days old. Or, of course, "M 15" to get full moon, "M -2.3" to get
a time 2.3 days before new moon, and so on.

> Another thing: In eclipse mode, when right-clicking into the map,
> currently the contact times are given. What about giving the altitude of
> the sun at the contact times? This would make planning solar eclipse
> travel a lot easier. Also an information on the duration of totality
> would be more convenient.

True, I could fit those in. The current right-click box doesn't
have a huge amount of information in it. (In most cases, I try to make
sure that a right-click leads to just a few bits of information, with
extreme detail reserved for 'more info'. But in this case, 'more info'
leads to nothing but "No information available". At the very least,
it could lead to the alt/az of the sun at each contact time. More
generally, since Guide shows such things as occultations of stars
by asteroids and planets using the same machinery, Guide should show
the alt/az of the sun for all events, _and_ the alt/az of the occulted
object for things such as asteroid occultations of stars. That way,
you could quickly see: "This occultation will take place well above
the horizon, but the sun will be only six degrees below the horizon...
I probably won't be able to see it."

OK, I should be able to do something like that. Probably not soon;
I'm really trying to limit myself to fixing bugs only, since I'm hoping
to get DVDs made soon for Guide 9. (But I am _very_ tempted by the
lunar age idea!)

-- Bill