Just been remembering a few things that Guide does that are within a planning context.

For planets, asteroids and comets there's Quick Info, with a user definable lower limit of magnitude.

You can use it realtime, or change date to night of interest.

The clickable link is colour coded with likelihood of observability based on altitude and solar elongation.

Position, magnitude and other stuff are given. The clickable link goes straight to that on which clicked.

You want to look at NGC objects?, well pick a constellation, zoom in to show most of the constellation, and set the limiting magnitude to your lower limit, and the sky will fill up. But if you use a planner, a long list will ensue. It's the same thing.

A planner will likely be able to use other criteria like size of object, although most catalogues carrying that info contain much that is apocryphal, but it is something extra it can do.

Asteroids whether they are NEOs or not? Well, there are ways around that, but it isn't ideal. I've seen on this list some who find ways to do that. But we're getting a bit esoteric there, no average night is going to have on average average kit viewable NEOs worth looking at.

Binary stars via separation distance? Well, admittedly Guide might not do that, unless the latest version draws some sort of line on the symbol or something, I dunno, I use my own TDF for the latest WDS catalogue.

A planner could help there where Guide could like not without some graphical yardstick representation.

I've observed deepsky, binary star, variable star, planets, asteroids (including NEOs going across the field at one hell of a lick) comets all with Guide, back to Guide 2, and using Guide to plan (and once I was able to get on the internet more full time in the early days, using Guide's asteroid fetching abilities). I did the planning with it, the charting, the Solar System object's tracks, the eclipses, most of the lot.

Nowadays I do virtually everything astronomical using SIMBAD, VizieR, ADSABS and IRSA IPAC, plus one or two other little bits, and very often Guide is my primary interface to these, that's why my TDFs have so many link outs built in.

I only wish the plethora of astronomical information sources would stick to one rigid standard for RA and Dec formatting so I could and paste them without editing into Guide goto RA, because no matter how many formats that latter understands, someone always invents another weird way of writing RA and Dec, and time for that matter! Often using weird separator characters.

But I can GOTO just about everything I've got catalogued in Guide via GOTO direct catalogue, or GOTO TDF of that catalogue.

Or GOTO Solar System object.

And certainly I recommend to everyone, pro or am, that they should examine catalogues graphically rather than textually.

With Guide I can go to a field of a degree or so size and see data from dozens of catalogues all plotted, with colour and shape coded symbols, at once, and notice cross referencing automatically, and that can be useful, because catalogues are a bit ropey on the whole, and things misclassified or misplaced more often than you'd think.

The logging aspect of a scanner I could possibly see, I'd probably just use a standard word processor, or likely a database file (I know a lot of people nowadays 'draw' card stye databases on excel sheets and do it that way, like an old cardfiling system).

So, I'm probably missing the point.

But I used to starhop, so I knew I'd to do a lot of planning, and still have my own homemade observing target book of culled together data for "best of" objects down to mag 13 on a constellation by constellation basis, intermixed with cut up charts from the petersen guide, cobbled together on a rusty 286. You get much fainter than mag 14 and there's just a plethora of stuff to wade through, most with no viable description anywhere (though again Guide plots up galaxies to orientation and elliptical outline for those bigger than an arcminute or two, which gives you a clue has to how aesthetic they can be).

So, I probably will never see the point of a planner.

Mostly because I know a lot of these catalogues well, I know many astronomical catalogues too well, and I know just how good some of them are and some of them aren't.

And the amateur descriptive catalogues, some of which Guide uses, are all very nice, but they must've been compiled some of them under bestest New Mexico skies with cutting edge optics, because they're certainly seeing things I've never seen.

The drawing up of stuff is essential in my view, but you could argue that's why a planner needs a link out.

I argue why bother with the planner when Guide can get you to most of what you want anyway.

And via ETB or command line invocation too.

Bill may or may not have replied because of never receiving the email, given the nature of trying to avoid unsolicited emails nowadays and over enthusiastic spamguards.

I personally wouldn't have replied because I'd've come to the immediate conclusion that she hadn't bothered to look, as there already were solutions to her problem if she had bothered to do so.

There's an etb route for doing it, if you want it that much you can follow that, if you don't, that's something else.

I have used Guide from the very beginning simply because I have control, not it. The data import capabilities may not be entirely a doddle, but if I can learn it, anyone can, coz my coding capabilities are really, really non-existant.

I read the catalogue readmes in full and use other extant TDFs and ETBs as template and adapt them accordingly.

This allows me to do many things others using other software charting apps cannot. And do it myself, mostly, so I don't have to wait for a solution.

Cheers

John