Re: [guide-user] Guide 9.0 on DVD

Bill J Gray Aug 22, 2011

Hi Joe,

Yes, and in fact, Guide 9.0 is just about ready.

Progress has been glacial, obviously, for various reasons.
However, my wife and daughter went on a week-long vacation,
and I've had a week free of interruptions, allowing me to make
absurd amounts of progress. I'm now waiting for a proof copy of
the user manual; a week or so after I approve it, a whole lot
of boxes ought to arrive on my doorstep. I am reasonably confident
that the DVD is ready to get replicated; I spent some time yesterday
looking at offers for DVD replication, and need to figure out
the cover art specs. The on-line ordering system is just about
working, aside from an oddity in how shipping is computed for
non-US/Canada orders that I need to fix.

Once all this is done, I'll put a few links on my Web site
for ordering/upgrading and describing all the changes that have
been made.

Incidentally, it _will_ be DVD-only. This lets me go well
beyond the 1.3 GByte limit, which is a good thing; even compressed,
the UCAC-3 catalog is pretty darn big. I also wanted to add some
other large files, such as the current DE-422 ephemeris (over
half a gigabyte).

There were also many issues with the two-CD solution, the
biggest being that a lot of people installed only the first CD.
Therefore, they missed out on a lot of interesting things, such
as the deep-sky objects appearing as you zoom in and the high-res
Clementine lunar image. This way, you can just pop in the DVD
and be ready to go. (One can copy the entire DVD to a four-GByte
memory stick and run from that, if desired.)

-- Bill