Hi Martin,

You can almost, though admittedly not quite, manage to do this already.

To do this, hit Alt-J and enter, say,

ASTFILTER=d<.3

This will cause Guide to show only those asteroids within .3 AU. You can
then go to Tables... Current Asteroids, and ask it to show all asteroids down
to, say, mag 100 (that is, faint enough so you can be sure they'll all get
listed.) Guide will have to think about this for a moment or two, but will
produce the list you want.

By the way, 'ASTFILTER' is documented at

http://www.projectpluto.com/update7.htm#asteroid_filtering

There _are_ some missing things here. Guide will list the asteroids, their
RA/decs, magnitudes, constellations, and elongations, and you can sort on
any of those parameters. I'd like to arrange matters so that you could select
what parameters are shown, to add in columns of (say) distance from earth,
distance from the sun, phase angle, absolute magnitude, and so on. The
first would be especially of interest in this case; you'd ideally want to
sort the asteroids by distance, closest to farthest. (Though you mention
wanting to be able to discuss the _brightest_ of the objects... that, at least,
you can do; magnitude is a quantity listed in the 'current asteroids' table.)

-- Bill