How I set These Up

[theskyhound]

Another minor comment: if I go in Nightly Planner/Get Observing List/Skyhound, the "Current Bright and Interesting Minor Planets" list appears twice, with two different filenames, current_mp.stx and current_Img_mp.stx. The details (upon doubleclicking) and sizes are identical (see screenshot). I have both ST4V and ST4I installed, perhaps the latter is a list for ST4I?  Sorry to sidetrack the conversation for a moment, it was related to MPCs but if this requires a longer conversation we can do it in a separate thread.

Thanks.

The lists for visual observing and imaging may sometimes be identical, but often they are not. Obviously much fainter comets can be imaged than can be seen visually. But what determines inclusion in a list is recent observational data of magnitudes and coma diameters, not limiting magnitude, so this is sometimes the same list of objects. The purposes of these lists is to allow me to distribute curated comet data, something no other software does. When you couple that data with the algorithms for visual difficulty and imaging SNR, you have a powerful way to determine which comets you should be targeting. The casual observer may think that magnitude alone is a good, but they would be very wrong about that. Unlike minor planets, we still rely heavily on amateur observations of magnitudes, coma diameters, and degree of condensation, in order to make accurate predictions for comets.