.hee files in Guide: format, translating, etc.

Last updated 17 March 2003

I'm slowly working on revising a lot of Guide's "go to" lists so that, instead of just showing you a list of objects, you get some additional information, such as the object RA/dec, magnitude, and so on. You can usually click on column headers to sort on a given entry, and see "help colors" to indicate whether the object is visible. So far, nearby stars, globular clusters, and "common name" deep-sky objects work from this method. Messier objects may follow.

Guide does this by reading data from .hee files. So far, these include nearby.hee, globular.hee, and common.hee. Such files exist for "static" lists; the lists for comets, asteroids, planets, and artificial satellites have to be rebuilt to reflect the fact that these objects move, and no .hee files exist for them.

Translation of .hee files: By default, Guide will look for a file with extension .hee. But if you're running in (for example) Italian, it will look first for a file with extension .hei. Only if that file is missing will it turn to the .hee version. Versions in other languages are constructed similarly, by altering the last letter of the file extension.

Format of .hee files: The rules are pretty simple. Any line beginning with a ';' is a comment line (currently, this is used in each .hee file just to tell people to look at this Web page.)