SkyMap Release History ---------------------- 01-DEC-95 v3.0 New features added: The single most important feature of this release is the switch from 16-bit to 32-bit compilers. Running as a 32-bit application is a slight problem for users of Windows 3.1 (requiring the installation of Win32s) but has the MAJOR benefit of making the program run 3-4x faster! As the world switches to 32-bit Windows (Windows 95 and NT) this will cease to be a problem. Total rewrite of the printing functions. A wide range of new printing options is now available, including setting a map title and entering notes which will appear below the map. It is now possible to scale the map so the specified field of view fits either the horizontal or the vertical size of the paper, which means that (at last!) a whole sky map can be printed in portrait orientation. A new "Constellations" item on the Options/Setup menu allows the labelling of constellations to be configured. Labels can either be the full constellation name or the 3-letter IAU abbreviation (this is very useful for whole-sky maps). The "Daily Phenomena" dialog now has a "Copy" button which copies the displayed information onto the Windows clipboard from where it can be pasted as text into a word processor or other application. Added a "Copy" button to all the object information dialogs to copy the displayed information onto the clipboard. Modified the information dialogs to explicitly state the epoch of the displayed data. RA/Dec values can either be referred to epoch J2000.0 or to the map's epoch of date and it was often not obvious which it was for a particular object. The "Search" dialogs now offer the choice of either drawing a map centred on the object, or displaying the information dialog for the object. This makes it possible to display information about any object in SkyMap's databases without having to go through the time-consuming process of drawing a new map first. We now compute physical ephemeris data for Mars and display it as both text and a diagram of the appearance of the planet on the information dialog. The longitude and latitude of the centre of the planet's disk, the position angle of the north pole and the illuminated limb are all displayed, as well as a picture showing the actual phase, the tilt of the polar axis, and the positions of the visible pole and equator of the planet. The information dialog for Jupiter now displays both physical ephemeris data (the position angle of the north pole and central meridian longitudes for both System I and System II), and also a diagram of the positions of the Galilean satellites. Physical ephemeris data for Saturn is now computed and displayed in the planet information dialog. We display both numerical data and a picture showing the correct appearance of the ring system. The ring system data also allows us to correctly compute Saturn's magnitude, whereas previously we only took account of the magnitude of the planet itself, neglecting the contribution of the ring system. Planet names can now be abbreviated to their first two letters. This makes whole sky maps tidier. Added an option to the comet dialog to configure the time period either side of perihelion that comets are visible for. This was previously fixed at one year, but caused an embarrassing problem when comet Hale-Bopp was discovered nearly two years away from perihelion! Displaying just the Messier objects on a Horizon Map is now very much faster than before. Moved all the object visibility buttons from the toolbar into a separate "floating toolbox" which can be switched on and off with a new item on the "View" menu. Added a "Time" floating tool palette. This provides a quick and easy method of changing the time and date of the map, allowing you to move backwards and forwards any number of years, months, days, hours, minutes or seconds with a single mouse click. A much requested enhancement! When a map is first drawn using the Hubble GSC, we have to create an index of all the chart boundaries in memory. This is quite a slow process, taking about 30 seconds on a double speed CD-ROM drive. We now cache this index to the local hard disk which means we can read it instantly on subsequent runs of the program. This makes drawing maps with the GSC a LOT faster. Added an option to cache GSC data on the hard disk. This means that when we read data from the GSC CD-ROM, we store a compressed form of it on the hard disk, so subsequent maps of that area don't require access to the CD-ROM. This makes map drawing a lot faster, and also allows GSC data to be copied to a notebook or other computer without access to a CD-ROM drive. When drawing an Area Map by dragging a selection rectangle on another area map, all the settings of the original map are used for the new map, rather than the new map using the default settings. Defaults are still used when drawing an area map from a horizon map. On the Area Map, there is now an option to display stars as points of differing brightness, rather than circles of different size. This requires a video mode capable of displaying 256 or more colours simultaneously. On the Area Map's right-click popup menu, added a "recompute" option to recalculate the map centred on the mouse position. This is not the same as the "centre" option which simply attempts to scroll the map so the clicked point is as near the centre as possible. On the Horizon map, draw the Sun and Moon when they are up to a degree below the horizon, so we can see them rise and set correctly. Previously they were only drawn if the centre was above the horizon, so the rising Sun/Moon wasn't shown until its centre was visible. On the Horizon map, keys "N", "E", "S", "W" now activate the corresponding direction buttons. Also, pressing the buttons resets the standard 90 degree field of view as well as changing the azimuth. On the Horizon map, key "Z" (Zenith) selects a view of the whole sky centred on the zenith. This is equivalent to View/Zoom To/180 degrees. The cursor keys now scroll the map. When the map is initially drawn, and when it's repositioned using the N,S,E,W,Z facilities the scrollbars are centred. This means that the image will zoom in or out around the original centre of the view. Added a dialog to give optional manual control over the spacing of the Area Map RA/Dec grid. The existing "Time Skip" feature allows the Horizon Map to automatically advance by a specified interval. Added a new "manual step" feature to move one step forwards or backwards manually. Comets and asteroids labels on the map now include magnitude. Planet symbols on the map can now optionally be displayed using the same size symbol as a star of the same magnitude as the planet. Bugs fixed: On an Area Map on which either pole was nearly but not quite visible the RA range calculations overflowed, sometimes resulting in stars to one side of 0h RA not being plotted, or occasionally no stars at all being displayed! The Horizon map RA/Dec grid settings were not being saved when "Save Defaults" was selected. In the "Planet Visibility" and "Phenomena" dialogs, explicitly select the "Arial" font rather than asking for a "generic" Swiss font. On systems with many fonts installed the choice of font was often odd! In the time skip options dialog, a 16-bit integer overflow occured if a value greater than 9 was entered in the hours field. On a black and white printed map. the ecliptic line was always drawn as a solid line, rather than using the selected line style. When multiple object tracks were visible on an Area Map, track lines were drawn in the marker, rather than the line, colour. 01-JAN-95 v2.2 New features added: When displaying comets and asteroids, a limiting magnitude can now be specified. This is useful to prevent 17th magnitude comets being shown if you only have a pair of binoculars! The information dialogs now all explicitly use the "Arial" font rather than simply asking for a "default" Swiss font. The previous method led to a strange font being used to display information on some machines with lots of fonts installed. If a date a long way (more than 50 years by default) from the 2000AD "epoch" is entered, and the program is in "low precision" calculation mode, the program will display a warning that the resulting map could have significant errors, and will offer to switch on high precision calculation mode before calculating the map. The line of the ecliptic can now be displayed. A new panel on the status bar displays the limiting magnitude of the stars on the map. Maps can now be saved as a Windows bitmap format (.BMP) file. This is a much-requested feature for saving a permanent record of a map. It's also a great way of creating Windows "Wallpaper" files! A new View/Copy menu item now copies the contents of the currently active view onto the clipboard, from where it can be pasted into a word processor or other application. SkyMap can now display on an Area Map stars (and other objects) read from the "Hubble Guide Star Catalog" (GSC) CD-ROM database. This set of 2 CD-ROMs, published by the Space Telescope Science Institute, contains approximately 19 million objects covering the entire sky to below magnitude 14. This facility is NOT available in the shareware version of SkyMap, but is provided as a new program "SkyMap/GSC", details of which are on the registration form. Added two new buttons to the toolbar to respectively add and subtract half a magnitude from the limiting magnitude of the map. This gives a quick way of rapidly changing the number of stars disp...
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