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Time label freq [ 6 ] Number of steps [ 100 ] Add a Trail... Clear Trails Cancel With the above settings, you would be telling Guide to show the trail for an object at ten-minute intervals, for 100 such intervals. At every twenty minutes, there would be an index mark (tick mark crossing the trail). There would be labels showing times along the track at every sixth step, that is, for each hour. By default, the "Round to nearest step" box would be checked. This would mean that if Guide's time was, say, 03:14:15.9, this would be rounded off to the nearest ten minutes, and the starting point of the trail would be 03:10:00.0. Also provided in the Add A Trail dialog is a button showing the color in which the trail will be drawn; you can click on that button to select a different color. The "Clear Trails" button lets you erase all trails of moving objects. However, as with so many things in Guide, you can click on a trail with the right mouse button, then tell Guide what color you want for that trail, or delete it. Once this setup work is done, you can click the "Add Trail" button, and Guide will pause briefly to compute and display the trail in question. Guide will automatically save your trails when you exit the program, and will bring them back up when you restart the program. The trails are stored as an overlay, which means you can control their display in the Overlay menu. You can add text, lines, and circles to the trails, select the fields of view where they can be shown, and remove unwanted objects; see the section on user overlays on page 36. The steps for creating an ephemeris for a solar system object are very similar to those for creating a trail. As before, set the current time to match the start of the ephemeris, and right-click on the object for which you want an ephemeris. Click on "Make Ephemeris", and enter the number of steps and their size. Again, there's an option to have the starting time rounded off to the nearest step size. Click OK, and Guide will compute the ephemeris and display it on-screen. You can save the ephemeris to a file or print it, much as you could any other help/glossary/"more info" item. By default, Guide will provide some fairly useful data in the ephemerides, but you may want to provide different details. For example, for an artificial satellite, the alt/az may be of greater interest than the RA/dec; or you may want to list the percent of an object that is illuminated. In such cases, it helps to click on the "Options..." button in the "Make Ephemeris" dialog. This leads to a
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