Hi Clay,

Updates to this are pretty darn rare. 'probes.dat' is mostly for
interplanetary missions. I've added a few here and there, usually
for objects coming back that might be observable. Cassini and Galileo
are there mostly because it's pretty nifty to set up a viewpoint from
those spacecraft (Cassini is in need of updating, though.) Similarly
for New Horizons. You can set your viewpoint to be from the Voyagers
and look back at the solar system from afar. There are a bunch of
old Mariner and Pioneer missions in there, simply because I found
elements for them that were easy to convert. (These are of ballpark
accuracy. They start near Earth at the right time and end up at Mars
or Venus at about the right time, though.)

But it's unusual for interplanetary missions to be observable,
and still more unusual for ephemerides to be made available. (Which
I consider to be a bad idea. I think every outgoing mission should
be tracked, both so we get information if something goes wrong --
when CONTOUR "went missing", the call went out for images; the
call should have gone out before launch -- and so that junk can
be tracked as well.)

-- Bill

On 11/11/2015 04:20 PM, 'P. Clay Sherrod' drclay@... [guide-user] wrote:
> Bill...how often do you update the database on the "probes" file.
> This is really something handy that will assist many people in following this stuff
> for you.
>
> Clay
> _____
> Dr. P. Clay Sherrod
> Arkansas Sky Observatories
> MPC H45 - Petit Jean Mountain South
> MPC H41 - Petit Jean Mountain
> MPC H43 - Conway West
> http://www.arksky.org/
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bill Gray pluto@... [guide-user]" <guide-user@yahoogroups.com>
> To: <guide-user@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2015 3:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [guide-user] RE: How to see the object WT1190F guide 9?
>
>
>> Hi Grant,
>>
>>> Never mind – I have it. You have to use GOTO….Asteroid, then
>>> enter WT1190F, for some reason.
>>
>> That's a bit odd. You're right, though; I'd not noticed it,
>> because I'd used Go To... Object Name, and entered WT1190F. Both
>> work. Go To... Satellite does not.
>>
>> To get it to show up, you have to go to Data Shown, and either
>> turn satellites "on" or set a magnitude limit such that WT1190F shows
>> up. (It's at about mag 20 right now.)
>>
>> Also, be warned: the elements in 'probes.dat' (or 'probes.txt')
>> run from 1 November up to slightly after impact (13 November 06:19).
>> They'll be quite good for observing from now until then. They are
>> probably not so great for early November, other than to give a ballpark
>> idea of what WT1190F was doing back then.
>>
>> Grant, that bit with HTML tags being added in when you saved
>> 'probes.dat' is _really_ bizarre, and represents a new low for
>> Internet Exploder (I'm pretty sure that was the offending browser).
>> One can get around that (possibly entirely intentional) defect in
>> the browser by getting this file :
>>
>> http://www.projectpluto.com/probes.zip
>>
>> and extracting 'probes.dat' from it.
>>
>> No matter how you get it, whether by just downloading 'probes.dat'
>> or by getting 'probes.txt' and renaming it, or by extracting it from
>> 'probes.zip', the file 'probes.dat' should contain exactly 21058 bytes.
>>
>> -- Bill
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------
>> Posted by: Bill Gray <pluto@...>
>> ------------------------------------
>>
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>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
> Posted by: "P. Clay Sherrod" <drclay@...>
> ------------------------------------
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