[guide-user] Re: ambiguous asteroid positions
Bill Gray Mar 13, 2000
Hi Lawrence,
Ignore the built-in Guide position and pay attention to the MPCOrb
based one.
That 'built in' position comes from elements burned onto the CD.
This is not a big problem for well-observed objects, but you've got
a situation here where Guide's data is based on the short arc found
before that disk was made, and MPCOrb is including later observations.
Right-click on this asteroid in Guide, ask for 'more info', and the
number of observations used and the arc-length in days will be given
for both built-in and MPCOrb elements. In general, you can use this
to decide if the built-in data is "good enough" for a given asteroid.
-- Bill