Hi Mark, John, all,

I have indeed had several comments about observation planning...
I've stayed away from adding such features to Guide, on the
theory that others (including, from what I hear, Phyllis Lang
with Deep Sky Planner) are already doing a perfectly good job
at it. But linking to someone else's observation planning
software has been on my mind as a possible project for a while,
basically so that when people ask me about adding observation
planning features to Guide, I could say, "Just use (insert
name of some other program); it'll hook into Guide."

Mark (and others interested in this feature): what sort of
link(s) were you thinking of? Something along the lines of "select
an object in DSP and get information from Guide about it", or
"just have Guide center on that object", or "make a list of
objects in DSP and show them in Guide", or "click on an object
in Guide and have DSP show info about it", or... ?

As John indicates, there is some ability to do at least some
of these things Right Now. One can, for example, take a list
of objects and display them as symbols in Guide; this is what
the "user-added dataset" capability is all about. There are
probably situations where an event list (.etb) file would be
a better idea.

Going in the other direction: when you click on an object,
Guide makes a file "showpick.txt" containing RA/dec data (in
J2000 and apparent epoch of date) plus the information shown in
the dialog on-screen. I did this originally for people with
certain telescope control systems; they could just read the
"showpick.txt" and get the RA/dec they wanted, and point the
scope there. (Some systems wanted J2000 coordinates; others
wanted apparent coordinates of date... which, for scope control,
makes perfect sense.) But it does have uses beyond telescope
control systems; for example, a program can skip the coordinate
data and get the name of the object on which the Guide user clicked.

Anyway... you get the idea: some pieces of this puzzle exist.
Others could probably be added.

-- Bill