Guide 9 is a comprehensive program for creating star charts and simulating celestial movements. It generates star charts whose size can be adjusted from a full hemisphere (180 degrees) to one arc second and which can display a wide variety of different celestial objects. The program is typically used to create individual finding charts for use with a telescope or to directly control appropriately equipped telescopes. The program is available in German, including the manual and help texts. The catalogue data for most of the catalogues used is also in German.
Guide has a large number of options for how and with what content a star chart can be displayed. For example, charts created for the observation of variable stars can contain all known and suspected variables, but no galaxies or nebulae and only asteroids up to magnitude 13. With Guide, it is very easy to create and print such specialised charts.
Guide can control most current telescopes "directly" because it uses the individual communication protocols of the telescope manufacturers. At the same time, Guide can use ASCOM drivers, which means that only very exotic instruments cannot be controlled.
Another main use is the extensive detailed information available for each object. Guide can output information from several different catalogues for almost all objects and compare them to show you everything you want to know about an object.
In addition to the already very extensive range of catalogues supplied, you can also import your own data sets according to your needs. Very often, however, you don't even need to bother doing this yourself, as almost every conceivable catalogue has already been prepared for use by a Guide user. Some of these catalogues are already included in the current versions of the DVD. Nevertheless, it is still possible to add any data collection that is available as "plain text" (ASCII) to Guide with moderate effort.
Guide 9 shows almost everything in the solar system: artificial satellites, all planets, almost all moons, of course the Sun and Moon, and even comets and asteroids. You can zoom in on planets and moons so far that surface details become visible, e.g. on a detailed map of the Moon (link). Lists of different types of planetary events or maps of eclipses and occultations can be easily generated.
Two databases are used to create the maps: the Tycho-2 catalogue with information on the 2.5 million brightest stars and the UCAC-3 catalogue with positions and magnitudes for approximately 100 million stars up to magnitude 16. If you need more data, you can enlarge individual areas of the sky and import data from the USNO-A2.0 or B1.0 catalogues via the Internet and display it. If you have a complete copy of these catalogues, you can also use them in Guide. Guide can display several other "mega catalogues" available on the Internet, such as UCAC-2, SDSS or GSC-2.4, in the same way.
Guide 9 can display a very large number of deep sky objects: more than 190,000 galaxies and almost all catalogued star clusters and nebulae. It also offers photographs of almost all deep sky objects displayed, which appear when you enlarge the object (link for example). These high-quality photographs come from the Digital Sky Survey (DSS). If the number of photos provided is not sufficient, you can download additional DSS images for the map section from the Internet and integrate them.
