A quick update on the "doubled asteroids" situation: I was thinking
about it this morning, and suddenly realized a way to fix it that took
about two hours. With the next update, the "doubled asteroids" should
be shown in their proper (singular) form.
One nice side benefit of this may be a means to allow better settings
of individual asteroids: click on one and say "show this regardless of
limiting magnitude" or "numerically integrate this guy". The former is
helpful if, say, you want to show one or two or a dozen specific
asteroids without having all the others show up. (For example, if
you had wanted to show 2002 NY40 in a wide field of view, without
also showing every asteroid as bright or brighter than 2002 NY40.)
Laurent, about asteroid/planet trails: you should be able to
right-click on one of these, then "color", then reset the color.
But only that particular trail will be reset. Set the trail color
with "toggle overlays", and you're setting the color that will be
used for any future trails. (There is a similar color setting box
in the Add Trails dialog.) So the only mystery is why the right-click
on a trail doesn't work... no real idea on that one, but if you could
e-mail me the trail as an attachment, I'll take a look.
About entering comet elements: if you select "(new asteroid)"
instead of "(new comet)" in the Edit Comet Data dialog, there should
be no problem (because an A will appear in the proper column in
COMETS.DAT). If that doesn't happen, it probably means that
COMETS.DAT itself has been slightly corrupted: the "(new asteroid)"
line near the end of the file probably lacks an A in the proper
column. When you add a new comet or asteroid, Guide uses those
lines as templates, replacing orbital elements and names and such;
if the template lacks the 'A', so will the copy.
Romualdo, about Tycho-2: yes, Guide has it, and uses it as
the database for the 2.5 million stars in that catalog. Any star
in that catalog will be shown using Tycho-2 magnitudes, colors,
positions, etc., and data from that catalog will be given in
"more info".
As Kevin pointed out, you can download a new version of the Lowell
ASTORB data. But Guide won't recognize it properly. At present, when
I update Guide's "built-in", on-CD asteroid data, it has to go through
a long series of programs that produce the binary element data sets,
discovery circumstance files, and so on. Because all of this stuff
is only run by me, I've never bothered to make it at all user-friendly.
Ray, the current "production release", accessed by clicking on
Updated Software from the main Project Pluto page, is indeed the
4 May one. Bolder citizens have been trying out a "test" version at
http://www.projectpluto.com/new.htm
Speaking of which... I'm still awaiting comments from Astro-Physics
users: did my fix work? Any comments, too, from NexStar users about
the changes made for the various flavors of that telescope?
Armin, about the speed of MPCORB use: Guide can display its
"built-in" asteroid data quickly because a lot of data has been
precomputed. Guide can immediately ignore about 99% of asteroids for
a given screen as being too faint or nowhere near the current part
of the sky. The precomputation is a slow process (fortunately, it
need only be run once by me, then pressed into each CD-ROM).
I _have_ made MPCORB use much faster than it used to be, by
having Guide compute some magnitude and region limits for each
asteroid. But change the time/date by more than a day, and it
has to recompute all of that data. This causes a long pause,
probably the reason you're thinking of MPCORB use as being slow.
-- Bill