Hi John,
Find_Orb is expecting the Minor Planet Center "standard" format:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/info/OpticalObs.html
This is the standard format produced by astrometry software, and
under the normal use by observers, it's just fine. It does have some
lacks, such as no way to specify error estimates... which is probably
part of why the folks at AstDyS came up with their RWO format. (MPC
is in the process of adopting a new observation format.)
I was able to convert the .RWO file to the MPC format without too
much trouble, and the result is at
http://www.projectpluto.com/107.ast
Note that only observations from three observatories are included:
(673) Table Mountain, (689) Flagstaff, and the transit-instrument
based astrometry from (950) La Palma (the Carlsbad Meridian Circle).
It's _really_ important here to use only _good_ observations. Throw
in the stuff from the surveys (which emphasize getting lots of "pretty
good", but not "insane accuracy-freak good" data), and your track
will be thrown off horribly.
Using the above data in Find_Orb, setting an epoch of 5 September
2004, I got the following orbit:
Orbital elements:
(107)
Perihelion 2006 Dec 18.377178 TT
Epoch 2004 Sep 5.0 TT = JDT 2453253.5 Find_Orb
M 233.25471 (2000.0) P Q
n 0.15190406 Peri. 309.69831 -0.54378031 -0.83896936
a 3.4787491 Node 173.14696 0.81345892 -0.53302102
e 0.0790283 Incl. 10.04755 0.20636747 -0.10963117
P 6.49 H 7.1 G 0.15 q 3.2038295
From 166 observations 1996 Apr. 18-2003 Jun. 16; RMS error 0.191 arcseconds
I then saved the elements to a text file, went into Guide's
Extras... Add MPC Comets/Asteroids function, and clicked on "Add
MPC Comets/Asteroids" at the bottom and selected the text file I'd
just created. Guide replaced its "usual" elements for (107) with
those above. (You can confirm this by clicking on the asteroid,
then ask for "more info". Guide will list the epoch among that
info.)
After clicking on asteroid and star, then on "Show Eclipse", I got:
http://www.projectpluto.com/107.png (about 23 KBytes)
...which does show a little bit of a southerly drop to the path.
Still, remember that more data is apt to be gathered before 5 September.
-- Bill