Update posted

Bill Gray Apr 4

Hello all,

I posted a "development" testing two weeks ago. It appears
to be working well, so I've made it "official". If you go to

https://www.projectpluto.com/find_orb.htm

(i.e., the usual page for Find_Orb), you can download and
install from there.

I've added a variety of features in recent months, but what
really pushed the upgrade was a bug in the display of MOIDs,
found by Denis Denisenko and discussed on MPML :

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/MPML/conversations/topics/34970

Essentially, Find_Orb was sometimes getting an incorrect MOID;
the current MOID algorithm appears to be nearly bulletproof (and
can determine MOIDs for parabolic and hyperbolic objects, which
the previous method couldn't.)

Other improvements are :

-- Lots of updates to observatory codes. (Which you may already have,
if you've downloaded the MPC's list recently.)

-- Much better Spanish translation, thanks to GitHub user 'focanag'.
(Click on Settings, and see languages near the bottom of the dialog.
Note that most languages are only partially translated. I did the
German and Russian translations, and I speak both languages poorly;
corrections, or further languages, are welcome.)

-- Fixed a problem with objects passing through the earth causing
the program to grind to a halt. This also involved some performance
improvements; orbit determination ought to be a little faster.

-- Objects passing through the earth's shadow will have their
magnitudes in ephemerides suitably adjusted (they get fainter when
partially eclipsed, then the magnitude is changed to "Sha" when
totally eclipsed.) This only happens a few times a year, but it's
an interesting thing when it _does_ happen. (And of course, for
artsats, it happens routinely.)

-- Fixed problem with reading observations from TESS. That satellite
has coordinates that are sometimes more than 100000 km from the geocenter;
MPC made a small revision to their data format to handle such cases,
and I had to modify Find_Orb to understand that modification.

-- Find_Orb assumed objects were not observed at distances over 100
AU. That assumption had to be revisited after 2018 VG18 ("FarOut") was
found at roughly 110 AU. Find_Orb now checks all the way out to 200 AU.
Let's hope the Planet Nine searchers rise to that challenge.

-- I'd anticipated a leap second at the end of this coming June,
but none has been announced by the IERS in Paris. (Or, as I call them,
the Time Lords.) The code now anticipates one at the end of 2019.
Kinda hard to see how they'd be able to avoid one then.

-- Lots of much smaller improvements, such as having more NEOCP data
shown "unredacted" in pseudo-MPECs many of them to the Linux/BSD/
Mac console version.