baffled by longer arcs

puck2017 Nov 25, 2014

Hi all,


I am baffled by the way Find_Orb is responding to some long-arc observation files.  I am trying to compare some "new" observations with the full historical record on objects like J99C03U, K02TJ0R, K13F13Y, K13E00A.  The automatic orbit fit comes up with residuals of 3"-5", and that's not a level I'm usually happy with. (I thought 1.5" was about my max.)  The K02 object actually comes up with 2" residual but only 79 of 184 observations are used in the fit.  If I hit Auto-Solve on K13F13Y, the residuals start high but do eventually get back down to 4".  But on the other 3, as soon as I hit Auto-Solve, the residual really goes to hell.  For K13E00A, for example, the first time I hit "AS," it jumps to e=28.4 and residual=119102"!  I also feel like an undergraduate student that I work with was able to get a better orbit fit than I was on some data set - so all of this is making me wonder if I have some fault in my installation.


Does anybody else see the issues I'm outlining here?  Or is it just me and my particular installation?


Thanks,

Andy Puckett