Dear Bill, lot of time I don't contact you.
Here I have another proposal regarding as usual our work on Minor
Planets:
have you got ever considered the possibility to make more "human" the
ORBFIT software under Windows?
It can be found, as you certainly know, but the address is for othar
friends that may ignore it:

http://newton.dm.unipi.it/~asteroid/orbfit/OrbFit/doc/help.html#authors

It is a freeware, delivered with source codes, all files and data needed
to make changes on it, so.....
It could be very very useful for people like us that, after the entry on
job of the refurbished Oshin Schmidt telescope in Palomar Mountain, and
other ones just round the corner, makes our reserch on new objects at
least a Russian roulette. Instead, with ORBFIT, if I have correctly
understood the capabilities, we can try the recovery of a lot of objects
we find continuosly in old (and new) plates and images. In effect, at
that page they say:
"...... (Orbfit may be used) to find a well known asteroid, to recover
a lost one, to attribute a small group of observations, to identify two
orbits with each other, to study the future (and/or past) close
approaches to Earth ...."
The ORBFIT Consortium says that the software cannot be included in
packages sold to other people, but you are well known between
professional astronomers, and if truly it's impossible to put it in
GUIDE8, you can give it freely, as Charon and FindOrb.
Can you make us this big gift? Ehat you think about my request?
Thank you whatever will be your answer.
By
Andrea Pelloni
157 Frasso Sabino