Hi Bill, all,
A friend of mine detected an object in some wide-angle images that he had been taking of the sky. The object was moving ridiculously fast, about ~15 arcminutes per second, and he decided we should investigate further when it didn't show up as any identified object among any of the ~16000 known artsats with TLEs. Unfortunately, due to the huge movement speed (and the huge aperture that he was using to even detect it for so long) the resolution of the images we have is exceptionally terrible for astrometric purposes, on the order of about 10-15 arcminutes (600-900 arcseconds) for each observation. It seems find_orb really doesn't like sigmas this high, but I think if it properly processed these the observations would be very good for calculating the orbit of the object and determining whether or not it's even a satellite (considering that this range is over 45 degrees across the sky, I'd be surprised if something couldn't be gained from this.) So do you know any way to force it to process these observations and not throw a fit whenever I try to give it inaccurate observations like this?
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~Sam