C2A 2.1.4

Management and display of artificial satellites positions using orbital elements in TLE files. This function requires Python 3 to be installed on the computer where C2A is running. The C2A help file includes all the required information to install Python 3 on your computer (look for Python in the index). This information is also available in the FAQ section of the Support page of the C2A Web site.
Computing and display of planet elongation in identifications. This function requires Python 3 to be installed on the computer running C2A.
Addition of a new function called Magnitude Histogram which gives the number of stars in pre-defined classes of magnitude of all the stars in the sky from a certain location and at a certain date. This function requires Python 3 to be installed on the computer running C2A.
A bug has been fixed regarding the width and height of some C2A windows when the size of the Windows text was changed to 125% in the system options.
Two buttons have been added in the Location tab of the Options dialog box that give the possibility to specifiy the latitude and longitude in decimal degrees.
Two buttons have been added in the Location tab of the Options dialog box so that the user location file can be easily edited and reloaded.
The MPC URLs used for the automatic import of orbital elements have been updated in order to get more reliable sources.
The meteor shower URL has been changed to reflect the new location of this information on the Internet.
A bug has been fixed in the automatic download of the Bowell orbital element catalogue.
An option has been added in the Misc tab of the Options dialog box to specify if one wants to display the small panel when saving the parameters during the C2A exit process.
A new item has been added to the File menu to exit C2A without saving the current parameters.
An option has been added in the King method in order to specify the rotation direction of the star on the sensor. The reason is that the King formula is different in the North and South hemispheres or if the image is inverted by the optical system or the processing software.
The longitude sign has been changed in the main window display in order to respect the most commonly used convention, i.e. positive eastward.

A field 'Tag' has been added to the Observation Logbook in order to associate use metadata to the Logbook entries and perform more powerful filtering. This new field does not require to upgrade the Logbook database, this is done automatically by C2A.
A rotation parameter has been added for the CCD field markers of type 'Rectangle 2'.
It is now possible to create a CCD field marker of type 'Rectangle 2' in the C2A TCP/IP socket protocol.
Two items have been added to the Telescope contextual menu in order to set the 'Tracking Rate' of the telescope controller. These commands are only available for the Gemini Pulsar 2 controller and the ASCOM drivers that support Tracking Rate setting.
An option has been added to define the time-out value on image acquisition.
A new method is used to calculate the Sun an Moon rise and set times. It uses the centre of the solar and lunar disks while the other method (from Meeus) uses the disk border. It must therefore be noted that there are differences between the different C2A tools that report Sun and Moon rise and set times.
The center of the solar and lunar disk is used for:
The control panel of the object information window;
The Ephemeris tool;
The Moon phase tool (in the tooltips).
The border of the disk is used for:
The Sunrise and Sunset tool;
The visibility bars in the planet visibility tool.
When the C2A icon properties were set to launch the program in a maximized mode, a display bug was occurring and only a fraction of the screen was used to display the map.
A bug has been fixed in the annual visibility tool. For the first day of the month as the current date, the month labels were shifted by one position towards the left. Furthermore, there were some inaccuracies on the labels.
There was a bug in the Observation Planner tool. Some entries from the Logbook were not correctly eliminated in case a filter was set.
A bug has been fixed for the search on IC objects. Adding an extension under the form of a letter (A, B, C, ...) was causing an error.

Support of the URAT1 astrometric and photometric catalogue.
Support of the SAC 8.1 deep sky object catalogue (see Saguaro Astronomy Club).
Search is now performed on a part of the deep sky object names is nothing is found on the full names.
A new user object called Frame can now be used to define CCD observation fields. This can be useful to plan mosaics for instancce (search frame in the C2A help system index).
It is possible to export the current CCD field marker to a Frame from the menu Edition (the frame declaration is copied in the Clipboard so that it can be easily reused in a user file).
A new contextual menu associated to the combination Ctrl + left mouse button has been added in order to quickly switch the time increment to be used when pressing the keys + and - from the keyboard.
Proper motions are now taken into account in the WDS catalogue.
Two new types of deep sky objects have been added: Globular Cluster in a Galaxy and Cluster with Nebulosity in a Galaxy. They are only used for the SAC 8.1 catalogue and user files are not impacted.
In the astrometric resolution process, it is now possible to cross-match the GCVS and WDS catalogues. An option has been added to display the names of the stars in these catalogues.
An option has been added in the Observation Planning tool to eliminate from the search all the objects already present in the Observation Logbook (in order to avoid targeting already observed objects). Take care that the names of the objects in the Observation Logbook must be exactly the same that the ones used by the Observation Planner.
Default values in the file used to save the configuration have been changed to avoid a problem with the decimal separator on some international Windows configurations.
Several minor bugs reported by C2A users have been fixed.

New features:
The range of date for the IMCCE polynom file (file wap.b98) goes now from 1987 to 2040 instead of 2020. It is therefore possible to compute the positions of Solar System objects up to 2040.
An other option to automatically import asteroid orbital elements has been added. A list of asteroid names can be read from a text file and the orbital elements are then obtained from the astorb.dat file that must be available locally on the PC.
The latest version of the RNGC/IC catalogue (August 24, 2014) is now released with C2A.
The galaxy morphological classes have been added to the RNGC/IC catalogue objects. The following classes are used: Elliptical, Lenticular, Spiral, Irregular, Peculiar, Compact, Dwarf, Ring.
It is now possible to filter galaxies according to their morphological class for display in the maps.
It is now possible to filter galaxies according to their morphological class in the observation planning tool.
A tool has been added in the Astrometry contextual menu to measure the movement of a Solar System object over time.
Two small buttons have been added at the top left of the map to quickly switch between the two types of view that C2A supports (Horizon and Field).
The mouse behavior has been modified. It is now possible to zoom with the mouse wheel and take into account the position of the mouse in the map to recenter the view in direction of the targetted point. Furthermore, the mouse left button behavior can be optionally changed: it can be used to translate the view rather than drawing rectangles to perform zooms. Take care however: for the views with the type Field, the translation is stopped if one of the two celestial poles has been reached and is at the center of the view. For the views with the type Horizon, the translation is stopped when the zenith or nadir are reached.
A new function has been added to perform searches on deep sky object common names. This function is available in the Find dialog box.
A small button with a question mark has been added next to the quick search zone in the control panel. When pressed, the Find dialog box is displayed to perform easy searches.
Dates have been modified in the Planet Visibility tool. If the map's current time is before noon local time, C2A uses the previous day so that the date line is positioned on the right day in the visibility diagram.
In the Observation Logbook, the current date and local time are used as the observation time. Furthermore, the object name is automatically positioned (for the RNGC/IC catalogue).
A problem has been fixed in the Planet Visibility table. Some cells could be empty.
An option has been added in the astrometric and photometric resolution tool in order to display the reference star names in the images as well as in the exports.
The name of an extended object has been fixed: Sh2-40 is actually Sh2-240.
It is now possible to paramterize the maximum distance in pixels for the movement of a star when using the King method to perform a polar alignment.

New features:
Support of the catalogue CMC15, an astrometric and photometric catalogue of more than 122.7 million stars in the red magnitude range 9 to 17.
Support of the catalogues Guide Star 1.2 and Guide Star ACT in their native formats. This provides more information on the catalogue objects than the compressed version of the 1.1 catalogue used until now by C2A. It is also posible to perform searches on the 1.2 and ACT catalogue objects.
Magnitude bands have been added to the export process for the UCAC3, UCAC4, NOMAD, PPMXL and CMC15 catalogues.
Deep Sky Object common names have been added (154 as of today).
An option has been added to display the equator line whatever the grid type is in the current map.
The date and time background is turned to red in the main window dialog area if a fixed date and time are used in the current map rather than the PC current date and time.
An option "/image_processing" has been added in the command line to display only the Image Processing window.
In the Image Analysis tool, a button has been added to copy the displayed data into the Windows Clipboard.
Several small problems have been fixed: local time is used in map printing if this is the current setting; grid labels are printed in black if the automatic color setting is requested; a bug has been fixed in the angular distance calculation; a parsing bug has been fixed in the "Exoplanet Transit Database" dynamic catalogue; a bug has been fixed that occurred when FITS images were loaded from folders that

A tool has been added to easily get the times of sunrise, sun meridian transit, sunset and astronomical, nautical and civil twilights.
A table summarizing the rising, stransist and setting times of the Sun, Moon and planets has been added to the Planet Visibility tool.
Two special magnitude bands have been added in the advanced options for the UCAC3, UCAC4, NOMAD and PPMXL catalogues: a band where priorities can be defined among available magnitude and a compound instrumental magnitude band.
An advanced option has been added to the NOMAD catalogue in order not to display stars which do not have a magnitude defined for the current magnitude band when a filter is set.
The OCX SComm32 control is now integrated with C2A in order to better support USB/RS232 adapters for controlling telescopes. An option has been added to optionally go back to the former Microsoft standard MSComm OCX control.
A problem has been fixed in the Observation Logbook: the PDF export process was not working properly when the file name was containing characters with accents.

Added a Meteor Shower dynamic catalogue.
The Celestron NexStar telescope controller is inow natively managed by C2A.
NMEA-compatible GPS are now taken into account by C2A in order to automatically update the observation location, the date and the time.
A bug has been fixed in the Observation Logbook (an issue in constellation indexes could hang C2A during a PDF export).
It is now possible to perform 10 successive "undo" on Logbook entry deletes.
Two buttons have been added into the C2A Control Panel for calibration and slewing on the currently identified obejct.
A bug has been fixed in the object search capability. Searches on HD objects could not be completed.
It is now possible to produce thumbnails to represent planetary positions for all the days of the current month.
Options have been added for the thumbnail image production (Moon phases and planetary positions about image format and image quality).
Improvements in the object visibility window (in particular for the Juiter GRB).
An export function has been added into the object visibility window.
Better control on dates when creating a chart from OccultWatcher. On foreign Windows systems, the data format can take some unusual formats.
A bug has been fixed in the Hand Controller window: if it was minimized in the task bar, an action on the main window could hang the program.