Hi folks,

Looks as if I've got some fixup work to do. I've already done the
easy task, of changing "30 December" to "30 November". Now for the
hard parts:

I found the problem Arturo mentioned about certain occultations of
stars by Venus not appearing (essentially, any event where the
occultation would not be visible from the center of a transparent
Earth). I think I've got this fixed, but then again, I didn't
realize it was broken in the first place; it never affected (for
example) solar eclipses and asteroid occultations of stars (the two
cases I run most frequently).

I'm still looking into the missing 'movie frame' button. The problem
is that I wrote a bit of code intended to add new toolbar buttons
without destroying your existing toolbar settings. If I just supplied
a new TOOLBAR.DAT, you'd have to re-select the buttons you really wanted
to use... I figured that would be a real pain. But evading this required
some excessively clever code. "Excessively clever code" usually means
"bugs, bugs, bugs", and that appears to be the case here.

Christian, about the 'white Venus': you'll see that there is also
a bitmap for a "cloudy Venus". Might be closer to what you want. The
Magellan image of a cloudless Venus is educational, but I admit that
it doesn't match what you see through a telescope very well.

Lawrence, as Masaki Kouda mentioned, you probably need to download
the file PLANETS.ZIP from my Web site. Without it, you'll get bitmapped
features on a few planets (those for which I had bitmaps when your CD was
created). I think your CD predates the labelled features, so you also
wouldn't normally have that data. Get PLANETS.ZIP, and both will become
available.

Ronny, about showing asteroids as starlike objects of the correct
magnitude: the same idea applies to planets, artificial satellites,
natural satellites, and comets. I like the idea, at least as an
option. Personally, I suspect I'd only use it with artificial
satellites, but others would use such a feature in all sorts of
situations. It's on my "I really ought to figure out a way to do
this" list.

Andre, regarding scope communication over a network, or by
writing data to a file: I've done things of this ilk over the years,
but there has been very little interest in them. The main exception
is the AltAz system, for users of Mel Bartels' scope control system.
In that case, Guide writes assorted data (such as RA and dec) to
a file, SLEW.DAT, and a separate, user-supplied program, parses
that file to get RA/dec data. (You get a lot of other details, such
as alt/az data and field rotation data. But as far as I know, nobody
has made use of anything but the RA/dec data.)

This does leave the mysterious crashing of the 16-bit version of
Guide, reported by Thomas Roehr, and the "Guide starts and freezes"
mentioned by James Ellis. In both cases, it _may_ help to clean out
the Guide directory, re-install from the CD-ROM, then unZIP your
update files. Drastic, I realize, but it often cures bizarre errors.
Failing that, I may not be able to offer a solution until somebody
else reports the same errors.

-- Bill