What's New with RTGUI and its Related Files

December 6, 2019: (no release)

Capabilities of Yahoo Groups are being phased out. RTGUI Yahoo Group is now obsolete and no longer supported. The new RTGUI group is at https://groups.io/g/RTGUI . You can subscribe on that page, or bu sending email to RTGUI+subscribe@groups.io .

August 3, 2018: Release 12

The Minor Planet Center website no longer accepts ephemeris requests from third-party software such as RTGUI. This required some changes in the way asteroid and comet positions are obtained. For details, press "Get Comet/Asteroid" button while RTGUI is running.
Minor bug fixes: in some circumstances, constellation names were not being displayed.

March 15, 2017: Release 11

Changes in the Minor Planet Center website resulted in the "Get Asteroid/Comet" function no longer working. This has been fixed.

Aug. 28, 2015: Release 10

RTGUI has been tested to run on a Microsoft Windows Tablet PC, so long as it is running a standard version of Windows (for example, Windows 8.1 or 10, not "Windows RT" or "Windows CE"). The user interface of Version 10 of RTGUI has been enhanced to make it easier to use on Windows Tablets. All text, buttons and fields have been enlarged, and all functions on the main form can be invoked by typing a single character, displayed on the key. For example, you can invoke the "GoTo" function by typing "g", or by clicking on the GoTo button using a mouse or a stylus. Fields to click on the smaller secondary forms (for example, Catalog Select) have been almost doubled in size.
Minor bug fixes: Rounding error in Object Altitude display. "Cancel" button on Trace Object was not working.

2013 June 5, 2013: Release 9.3

Changes to the user interface for downloading positions for Near-Earth asteroids and comets. No longer just goes off and gets current parameters when position not found in current file. (This is a good idea for 60 days' positions, which always are obtained in real-time, not so good for the possible multiple datasets containing just 24 hours' positions). Now the user must approve getting the new positions.
Fixed problem with Scripting. Original command minalt (for minimum altitude) is changed to minal (6 letters down to 5).
Fixed rounding error in Azimuth display sometimes causing it to display "360 degrees."
Fixed a few data errors in FULL.RTG.

2011 Sept. 18, 2011: Release 9.2

New Feature: "Object Trace." Get a list of altitude & azimuth values for the current object, for a specified length and interval, starting at the current time (need not be Real-Time)
Fixed bug where trying to load a catalog from a drive that's not ready caused RTGUI to terminate.

added double-quotes to Command Line parameters for Skychart.

Feb. 28, 2011: Release 9.1

The servers at the Minor Planet Center underwent major reconfigurations (none of them documented), causing RTGUI's downloading of asteroid and comet positions to stop working. Changes have been made to RTGUI allow it to work with the new data configuration. There are still a few problems with the generated RTG files that I don't yet understand, but they are approximately 99% correct. If you should happen to hit an entry that does not look correct, try downloading the file again later, or changing the program time to pick up an earlier or later entry.

RTGUI now displays two COM port selections next to the "Options" button on the main form. The first is the COM port selected for the telescope connection. The second is the COM port selected for reading the GPS.