Hi,
> 50 000 of these. Matches up nicely with the constraint for
> which you're looking. Download it and rename it to mpcorb.dat,
> and you ought to be in business.
hmmm... nice tip. I'd look into it myself. If for nothing else, it ought to
make for a faster download :)
One thing on which I have remarked on earlier, is that Guide expects asteroids
in this file to be ordered in a series without holes in it. If you use a file
with holes in the series, Guide will show the asteroids but not their numbers.
Do you plan on fixing this, Bill? (I know it may be weird to wish for a fix, but
I do :)
And for those who still want to pull out an arbitrary number of lines from the
beginning of MCPORB.dat (or any other text file), I just put together a
quick'n'dirty program in Perl which I will put online when I get my laptop
online (it hasn't got a modem, my mother in law's Pentium 90 has...). You won't
need Perl as I made an exe of it. It does much the same thing as the 'head'
utility under Unix. Also, I'm sure there's gotta be software available through
e.g. download.com which does the same thing.
Now, for something completely different: Asteroid occultations.
I just tried observing my first asteroid occulation last Thursday. 407 Arachne
was supposed to occult a 10.6 mag star in Gemini, but from my observing site SW
of Oslo, Norway, it was a non-event. Simulating the event in Guide, and showing
the "eclipse" trail, out the trail in Southern Europe.
Now, I suspect that both the asteroid's orbit as well as the astrometry of the
stars involved have been improved since Guide was published. What I'm wondering
about really, is if anyone on this list knows how to obtain updated stellar data
so that the occulation may be show more precisely. There's a guy in Hungary I
believe, who does much of the predictions, and he produces all the maps involved
with Guide. Hmmm... guess I'd just ask him then...
Best regards,
Arild :)
---------------------------------
http://www.astro.uio.no/~arildmi/Scopes/
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