Hello Roger,

this comet is actually in outburst and behaves abnormally. If you use the
elements from

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Soft02.html

for observable comets and use them in Guide you could try to experiment
with the third and second last entries for this comet (13.0 and 4.0). These
determine the brighness of a comet with changing distances from the sun
and earth. But don't ask me for the formulae.

> Last night was my first opportunity to observe comet Linear 01 A2 under
> good sky conditions. I was very pleased!
>
> The comet seems to be dead-on its predicted path, so I have no reason
> to believe that the orbital elements are incorrect. However, if you right-
> click the position on the Guide screen, it gives a magnitude of 12.9,
> about 5 magnitude or 100x as faint as it actually is.
>
> Is there a way to edit the orbital elements for this comet so that Guide
> will give a closer approximation of its actual visible magnitude? I am
> also a user of David Chandler's program Deep Space and it lets you
> input the magnitude of the comet for a given date and makes its
> magnitude predictions using that information.
>
> The "more info" gives a very nice interpretation of the tabled data in
> the orbital element file. Perhaps a module could be added to allow
> for apparent magnitude to be input and considered in the calculated
> magnitude that Guide displays.

Hope this will help you.

Clear skies
Bernd


Bernd Brinkmann
Herne, Germany

http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Bernd.A.Brinkmann/index.html