Re: Newest stable version?

andrew_j_walker Aug 19, 2011

Nice to hear of all the updates Bill, I especially like the
linking widely separated arcs news. I'll also mention that
the astrometry for "Natural outer irregular satellites of the giant planets"
is now available on this page
http://minorplanetcenter.net/iau/ECS/MPCAT-OBS/MPCAT-OBS.html
which may give some interesting test cases!

Andrew

--- In find_orb@yahoogroups.com, Bill J Gray <pluto@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Andy,
>
> My goof; when I updated the Web page to describe the current
> "in-testing" version, I didn't correct the text at the top that
> basically says, "there is no 'in-testing' version. If you go
> back to
>
> home.gwi.net/~pluto/devel/find_orb.htm
>
> it should (correctly) describe the "in-testing" version. Which
> does have some very nice new features (especially the uncertainty
> data), and I'd recommend using it. In fact, if you're using .rwo
> files, I _highly_ recommend it, to get around some known problems
> in the "stable" version caused by a format change.
>
> As far as I know, the "in-testing" version is actually quite
> stable... at least, nobody has told me otherwise. Bug reports, either
> on this or in the officially "stable" version, are always welcome.
>
> I've been doing a fair bit with Find_Orb since then, and hope to be
> able to post some interesting improvements in a bit. The computing of
> uncertainty data works Just Fine (still not totally happy with how it's
> displayed to the user). I've been working on some code to make it
> easier to link widely separated arcs, so you can take an arc of a few
> nights from 1990 and link it to a few nights in 2011 (this has been
> nearly impossible before now). And handling three-parameter (A1, A2,
> A3) comet solutions, and a variant for objects like 2009 BD where the
> non-gravitational forces are just inverse-square, and computing circular
> orbits, and so on...
>
> Problem is, I also made improvements in the initial orbit determination
> routine. This still needs some work. My eventual plan is that Find_Orb
> ought to just load up astrometry and find a good orbit, even for some
> rather unusual cases (SOHO comets, for example). But it's not quite
> ready yet.
>
> -- Bill
>