SkyTools 4.0j R9 Release Notes

[theskyhound]

I have released an update to version 4.0j R9. You should be prompted to update when you start SkyTools, but this may not happen immediately. To force the update, select "Updates, Registration & Feedback" from the top level Setup menu and click Check for Updates.

The primary reason for this release is to fix a rather perplexing issue that caused a range of apparently unrelated problems when connecting to mounts using ASCOM. This happened for all versions of SkyTools 4. Many had no trouble at all. But others had symptoms that ranged from not being able to connect, to crashes. The most common report was receiving a "missing property" error. This was caused by a call to ASCOM that found its way into a thread in SkyTools. ASCOM does not play well when being called from a different thread. If you were having any kind of problem connecting to your mount, this will likely fix it.

Additional fixes:

Visual & Imaging

• The Eyepiece/Camera Viewer for the Atlas now defaults to being locked to the telescope position if opened with a mount connected to SkyTools. This should help people find where the telescope is pointing on the atlas.
  
• Chart labels for some moving object trails had the hours for the time truncated such that the first digit was not visible.
  

Visual 

• When printing logs using the Print/Copy logs for Observing Award feature: observing conditions text will now wrap when printed, and the text copied to the clipboard is better suited to pasting into Word or Wordpad.
  
• The Crab nebula was using the larger diameter of 8'x8' when estimating the visual difficulty. This outer diameter is mostly H-Alpha emission and not visible to the eye. The diameter was adjusted to a more appropriate 6'x'2 for the calculation, which now provides better results.