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work,  and I am very happy to be able to make use of the results.

   Nebula catalogs have long been a major problem for Guide; the Nebula
Databank and isophotes created by Eric-Sven Vesting have almost
completely reversed this bad situation,  allowing Guide to provide
accurate information (and shapes) for all major nebulae and most minor
ones.  This tends to be very time-consuming labor,  and a lot of hours
were expended to check and cross-reference catalogs,  and in extracting
nebula isophotes from RealSky data.

   The Nebula Databank and isophote data are copyrighted by Eric-Sven
Vesting,  and are used in Guide by permission.

   The asteroid data came from the Lowell Observatory ASTORB database,
computed by Dr Edward Bowell.  This represents a significant
improvement over most past sources of asteroid data; in particular,
the fact that it provides an indication of the precision of the orbit
is most helpful.  The research and computing needed to generate these
data was funded principally by NASA grant NAGW-1470, and in part
by the Lowell Observatory endowment.

   Thanks go to the Minor Planet Center,  especially to Gareth Williams,
for providing the MPCORB asteroid database (see page 60) and the
files used to patch in updated comet and asteroid elements (see page 61):

http://www.minorplanetcenter.org/iau/mpc.html

   Many of the mathematically intensive operations such as calculation
of planetary and satellite positions and magnitudes, precession,  and
many related problems were solved using the methods in Jean Meeus'
"Astronomical Algorithms" (Willman-Bell, 1991).  If you are interested
in the mathematical methods of astronomy,  this book is a must.
Information on this and other books used in creating Guide is at:

http://www.projectpluto.com/books.htm

   Special thanks go to the translators for the various foreign-
language versions of Guide:  Eric-Sven Vesting (German), Jean-Noel
Moreau (French),  Alberto Romero (Spanish),  Giuliano Pinto
(Italian), Guus Gilein and Siebren Klein (Dutch),  Masaki Kouda
(Japanese), Alexander Anikeev (Russian),  Jan Manek (Czech),  David
Wu (Chinese), Jozsef Lengyel (Hungarian),  and Marcin Siekierko
(Polish). These people are all native-speaking astronomy
enthusiasts, exactly the right people to do this sort of technical
translations. These versions have been immensely helpful in making
Guide easier for most of the world to use.

   Most of the improvements incorporated since versions 1.0 through the
present version were suggested by users on the response forms. Thanks
go to all who took the time to indicate what was useful, what would be
useful,  and what was really a bad idea.


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