Hello all,
An "in development" version of Find_Orb with several fixes is
now present at
http://home.gwi.net/~pluto/devel
Most of the improvements are listed at
http://home.gwi.net/~pluto/devel/find_orb.htm#History
I made a couple of mildly important bug fixes. In some cases,
if 'elp82.dat' was missing, the program had a bad habit of
appearing to work Just Fine, but putting the earth at the earth/moon
barycenter. The result was that residuals would climb up just a
bit, especially for NEOs... enough to be wrong, but not so
bad that you'd immediately recognize that it was wrong. If
'ps_1996.dat' was missing, you'd get slightly bad planetary
positions. Again, the error would be small enough that it might
pass unnoticed.
One is now warned if those files are missing.
Also, I've posted a Linux executable. So a Linux user can
download 'find_o32.zip', 'find_sou.zip', and 'find_orb', unZIP
the first two, and then run ./find_orb without having to
do any compiling.
I've tested said executable in Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 9.04, and
Puppy Linux 4.3. I don't really know for sure how it would work
on other Linuces.
If you try this update, please let me know what you find. If
I get a few "it works fine" and no "it crashes" reports, I'll move
it from "in development" to "official".
-- Bill